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Poker players have been looking for ways to perfect their tournament play for decades, but it wasn’t until the advent of online poker that real strides in that direction began. Among the many strategies invented by online tournament players, push fold charts have proven to be one of the simplest and most useful ones.
Push fold charts allow players to quickly and effectively play with short stacks in poker tournaments. With such situations coming up very often, these charts tend to be extremely useful.
In fact, if you want to be a successful tournament poker player, you should know push fold charts by heart and be willing to use them every time.
This guide will teach you how to use push shove charts, what they are good for, and what the push fold strategy is in the first place.
The biggest difference between cash games and tournament poker is that tournament chip stacks tend to get shorter as time passes.
Poker tournaments start players off with 100 or 250 bbs, but this number quickly dwindles, often leaving you with just 30, 20, or even 10 bbs in your stack in the later stages.
While going all-in for 100 big blinds is never really the right play, there is a lot of merit to pushing your entire stack into the middle when you have a stack of 15 bbs or less.
In fact, going all-in with all the hands you want to play in this spot is usually the best strategy as long as you are the first player into the pot.
The push fold strategy is based on the understanding that players will only call with fairly strong hands when you go all-in, even if they know some of your hands are bluffs.
By creating a balanced strategy that includes the strongest hands and bluffs with high equity, the push fold strategy can work like a charm. To help you decide which hands to shove from each position and with each stack depth, push fold charts were created.
The strategy is based entirely on simple math and nash equilibrium, and it guarantees you will be playing your hands profitably if you simply move all-in with them.
Going all-in will win you the blinds and the antes when all players fold or give you a chance to double up when you are called, putting you in an overall +cEV situation.
Push fold charts define the push fold strategy to the slightest detail. The charts tell you which hands to go all-in with if you are the first player into the pot in various positions and with various stack depths.
For instance, if you sit in MP with 12 bbs and everyone folds to you, a simple peek at the push shove chart for MP will tell you if you should go all-in with the hand you were dealt.
However, remember that using push fold charts during actual play is now considered illegal by most poker sites, so you should only use the charts to learn and practice the game while you are not playing.
Push fold charts were created many years ago, but they still work because there is simply no strategy to counter them. In fact, you can usually get away with pushing more hands than the charts suggest, as most players call all-ins with a tighter range than they should.
The charts themselves were created with the understanding that all players will make optimal plays and call with optimal ranges against your shoves, but this is definitely not true.
Especially in live tournaments, you will have the chance to move all in with many hands from all positions and win the blinds and antes with a high frequency.
You may be wondering why you should be going all-in before the flop with some of the speculative hands with which these charts suggest you do so.
For example, let us imagine a scenario where you have 10 bbs in the cutoff and are dealt KT. Everyone folds to you, and the remaining players behind you all have between 20 and 30 bbs.
If your stack was deeper, the standard play would be to open to 2.2x and play the hand from there. However, raising it to 2.2x now can be very problematic.
KT is a hand that you don't really want to keep playing with if you get re-raised, but also one that has a lot going for it if you decide to push it all in.
First and foremost, players are not very likely to risk 12 bbs from their stack if they don’t have a very solid hand, especially as everyone except the BB has to worry about players behind them too.
Your hand blocks quite a few of the calling hands like KK, TT, AK, and KQs, which is another reason to make the all-in play in this spot.
In those instances, if one of the players wakes up with a big hand and calls you, you will be in a bad spot against some hands like AA but also have plenty of equity against the likes of QQ, JJ, or AQ.
The important thing to remember is that you are not automatically eliminated if your all-in gets called, and you actually stand to double up some percentage of the time.
Most importantly, you will be winning 2.5 bbs every time everyone folds, which will be a large percentage of the time, and your stack will keep going up instead of down.
The only way to get deep in poker tournaments is to stay aggressive and keep winning those blinds while getting lucky in some spots and winning some inevitable showdowns.
Push fold strategy will not help you when you manage to build up a big stack, but it will be a real lifesaver when you get short and struggle to keep your tournament life going.
Push fold charts certainly make any poker player’s life a lot easier, but their big flaw is that they don’t work in every tournament situation. In order for any poker chart to come into play, you will need to be a short stack first. For that reason, you need to understand how stack sizes actually work.
The first thing to look at is your number of big blinds. The more bbs you have, the fewer hands you will get to profitably go all in with.
The push fold charts all indicate the exact stack size with which you should shove certain hands, but another popular metric is used in such spots, called M.
One M represents the value of all the chips you are forced to post in a single orbit of play. That means SB + BB + Antes, you pay in an orbit.
In most cases, one M is worth 2.5 bbs, as antes are usually worth 10% of the BB, and you pay 9 of them per round in a full ring table. The fewer players at the table, the lower the M becomes.
If you don’t want to remember every single push shove chart out there, you can try to group different stack sizes together into something along the following lines:
While push fold charts can be applied religiously in the earlier phases of the tournament, there is something to be said for deviating from them near the money or at the final tables. As a short stack, you will sometimes be looking to make money as your opportunities to stack up are not too open.
For example, imagine a scenario in a big field tournament where you have 4 bbs left. There are hundreds of players left in the tournament, but only a few more need to bust out for you to make the money.
Even if you are dealt a hand that push fold charts indicate is a shove, you should fold it. You will have very little fold equity, and people will be looking to call you light and burst the bubble. On the other hand, even a double-up won't put you in a great spot.
In a situation like this, it will be better to fold the hand, wait for the bubble to burst, and then go all in, even with a weaker hand.
Conversely, if you are the big stack at the table, you will have a chance to push short stacks around on the money bubble by going all in with a wide range of hands, as they won’t be able to call you lightly before the money.
The same logic must be applied at final tables where ICM implications become even bigger. As a middling stack, you will need to preserve your stack if there are shorter stacks at the table to move up the payouts.
As the big stack at the final table, you will be able to abuse shorter stacks and push much wider than the push fold charts indicate, as they won’t be able to call as lightly as the optimal strategy suggests.
Real tournament crushers understand all these concepts and are not afraid to use them and deviate from their push fold charts, and you should also learn when to do so.
If you want to be a successful tournament poker player, you will need to learn how to play with a short stack, and that will include playing the push fold phase of the game to near perfection.
Luckily, this stage of play is something you can learn by studying the push fold charts and practicing your final table short stack play with software like RangeViewer.
The more time you dedicate to studying this segment of play, the more success you will have in tournament poker, as short-stack play is an integral part of MTT play.
We recommend you start by studying the most basic push fold charts for late positions, such as the button and the cutoff, and work your way across positions and stack sizes over time.
After some months of practice, you will know which hands make for a profitable shove in various situations and when to deviate from your poker charts and try something a little different.
If you have the feeling you need to sharpen up your game then Pokercode is a great place to start. Sign up for a free account and set your first steps towards becoming a better poker player.
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