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Unit 13 · Tournament

Short stacks and push-fold

Twenty big blinds is a different game with a different chart.

One idea, then 6 lessons that drill it until the answers stop needing thought. Everything below appears inside the lessons themselves; this page is here so you can read it without playing, or come back to it after.

When the raise becomes the shove

The rule

Below about twenty big blinds, raising and folding to a re-raise costs more than moving in would have.

Open to two and a half and fold to a shove and you have lost two and a half blinds with no chance to win the pot. At a hundred blinds that is a rounding error. At twenty it is an eighth of your stack, given away for nothing, and it happens often.

So the raise and the all in collapse into the same action. It removes every decision after it, which is precisely the point: with a stack this size there is no street left where information could have helped you.

Read more: stack depth, expected value

The 6 lessons in this unit

  1. 1Opening short8 questions
  2. 2Calling a shove10 questions
  3. 3The price of a shove8 questions
  4. 4Facing a re-raise short8 questions
  5. 5Paint the shoving range3 questions
  6. 6Unit review10 questions · review

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