Problems with playing medium stack (40-20BB) at mid/late stages of the tournament
Join Date: Feb 2018
Posts: 8
Hey. I'm playing micro stakes (1-2$) MTT's and I'm having problem with playing medium stack (40-20BB) at mid/late stages of the tournament. I'm not making the right adjustments and I don't think I have the right idea on how to play medium stack at these specific stages of the tournament. What would you suggest I could try to adjust when playing medium stack at mid/late stages? I'm decent at playing deeper stack or short stack, but when I'm medium stack I feel like i'm leaking tons of money. Any advice is appreciated.
Join Date: Sep 2017
Posts: 50
Calm down and wait for your spots. Dont steal too loose against 10-20bb stacks if they are willing to push and defend alot. Learn push ranges so you know when people are deviating from optimal either tighter or looser ,so you know how to adjust your calling ranges. Just play solid poker overall. You cant play drawing hands as profitable with this stack size. You really want to flop a made hand and then try to get the stacks in when youre ahead. Ie. You steal AJ and flop toptop when theres fd on board, here you want to stack villains with 10-20bigs with their draws or weaker top pairs. And one thing that is really hard but not avoidable is the bigstacks. You dont want to steal loose against big stacks because they can float alot and bluff you off from a winning hand easily. You basically have to play pretty straightforward against bigstacks and when you are in a hand against them, you wantto play it big, you have to sometimes checkraise allin bluff with good draws to get them to fold and do the same with your made hands. Medium stack size at late stages takes practice to master. And reading articles and book chapters about it wont do any harm.
Join Date: May 2011
Posts: 1,688
Give tight cold call ranges due respect when oop. I.e. Don't recklessly continue.
Have a tight cold call range.
Join Date: Jan 2005
Posts: 4,822
Being the medium stack is tough, since every other stack size *should* try and profit from the dynamic of stack interactions. In addition to the other good advice itt, I would say: have a plan and stick to it, and try not to allow perceived reads on other players to make you deviate from your plan.
Personally, I play a 23BB stack more aggressively and try to use my ~6BB headroom to steal some blinds, and fall back to small stack of 17BB if this fails. The point being this is my plan and I stick to it.
