By Tony Guerrera

Single table tournaments (STTs) all boil down to the same end game scenario. Play gets down to five or six handed, and everyone except for possibly one player has less than 10 big blinds (BB) left. Since only the top three places pay, players become extremely tight to place in the money. They aren’t doing much raising or calling…they just sit, wait, and hope that other players get knocked out so they can sneak into the money.

If you sit and wait like everyone else, you are putting yourself at the mercy of a crapshoot. Granted, if you get to this situation consistently, you will be a slightly profitable STT player. However, if you want to be a really good STT player, you need some additional edge. As it turns out, your big edge in these situations is fold equity, the chips that you expect to win when your opponents fold.

Let’s use an example to motivate the discussion. You are in an online STT with a standard 50%/30%/20% payout structure. Five people are left. The average chip count is 3,000 with the blinds at 200-400. The stacks are the following:

Small Blind: 2,400 plus 100 posted

Big Blind: 2,800 plus 200 posted

UTG: 5,000

UTG+1 (You): 2,500

Button: 2,000

UTG (under the gun) is the big chip leader, and he’s really aggressive. He has been raising virtually every pot, repeatedly bludgeoning the other players, who have been playing tightly. In this hand, UTG uncharacteristically folds. You have 2-3 offsuit. Your natural reflex is probably to fold, but let’s look at this situation a bit more before automatically folding.

A good poker player is always open-minded enough to intelligently evaluate all possible choices before acting. With that in mind, all your options are as follows:

• Fold

• Call

• Raise, but not all-in

• Go all-in

Calling with 2-3 offsuit doesn’t really seem to make much sense. The only good line of play that can possibly evolve from that is seeing the flop heads-up against the big blind who then checks to you and allows you to take down the pot with a bet on the flop. Raising without going all-in is similarly disastrous. With just slightly over 6BB, and a weak hand like 2-3 offsuit, your only real options are folding or going all-in. To decide between folding and going all-in, you need to look into the future and ask how the tournament will play out if you fold.

Folding leaves you with 2,500 chips. You’ll be UTG next hand, and most likely, the table will still be five-handed, though there is some chance you’ll be down to four-handed. If you then fold UTG, the blinds eat away 600 of your 2,500 chips, leaving you with just under 5BB at a table with a highly aggressive big stack. If you fold your 2-3 offsuit now and the hand you’ll be dealt UTG, you will be at the mercy of the cards and the results of the possible all-in confrontations between the other players. If you do manage to get dealt a hand such that you can call with all your chips as a favorite, you’ll probably win 65% of such confrontations at best.

Having considered folding, let’s now consider what happens if you push all-in with your 2-3 offsuit. We need to know what hands your opponents will call you with. Different opponents will have different calling distributions, but in this situation, a reasonable calling distribution to assign to your opponents is pocket pairs down to about 55, aces down to about A-8, and possibly K-Q.

With three such players behind you, you’ll steal the blinds uncontested with your 23o about 61% of the time. The 39% of the time you are called, you will win about 26% of the time and tie about 1% of the time. Ultimately, pushing all-in with the 2-3 offsuit leaves you with enough chips to do damage about 71% of the time.

Pushing all-in with the 2-3 offsuit here is better than getting blinded down to 1,900 and hoping you’ll get a hand that you can call an all-in with! It’s clear, then, that you need to either push all-in with the 2-3 offsuit or with the random hand you’ll be dealt UTG. Let’s now analyze what happens if you push all-in UTG with the random hand you’ll be dealt.

When you push all-in with a random hand into 4 players on the [AA,55]||[AK,A8]||[KQ] distribution, you will steal the blinds about 54% of the time. The 46% of the time you are called, you will win about 33% of the time and tie about 2% of the time. Pushing with the random hand you’ll be dealt under the gun leaves you enough chips to do damage about 70% of the time.

Pushing with the 2-3 offsuit or pushing with the random hand UTG seem to be equally effective moves. The important concept to be learned from this analysis is that both pushes are better than folding and being blinded down to under 5BB. These all-in moves are great because of the high fold equity you are getting. When fold equity is the primary way through which you are accumulating chips, the cards no longer matter much.

When you are in the tournament endgame against very tight foes, fold equity is a sword that you should swing mercilessly. Of course, if you abuse your fold equity too much, some opponents may adjust and begin to reduce their calling requirements against you, so use your fold equity intelligently…pick up pots when you need to, but don’t abuse your fold equity to the point where you no longer have it. By intelligently using your fold equity late in STTs, you should find that your ROI (return of investment) should improve substantially.

Tony Guerrera is the author of Killer Poker by the Numbers

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