NLHE tournament strategy theory discussion:

I believe that in order to survive tournaments it is important to adjust your ranges based off of your effective stack size. I am just wondering if others think the same way.

My thought is... The more chips we have, the more time we have to wait for big hands to play. If we are too loose on our hand selection, we could bleed our stack away and not receive the benefit of a big starting hand. However, when we have mid/small stack sizes, we simply don't have quite as much time to wait and we are hurting our chances by being too tight.

So for example. Let's say we are sitting on the button and the CO makes a standard opening raise. The attached image is how I see possible playable ranges, based on the effective big blinds.

Do you agree with this, or would we be burning $ if we are playing this tight at 30bb+?

Do you agree with the principal of adjusting ranges and standard mode of operations, based on your effective stack? Or should we just be focusing on the belief that the same ranges are optimal no matter what the effective stacks are?

Chat GPT answer:

Hmm I don’t think you want to wait and play extra nitty with a lot of chips if you have a “big” stack. Play solid gto opening ranges, exploit the weak players, and play well postflop. Remember, you need all the chips to win a poker tournament.

I think when shallow at 20-40bb, we should be focusing more on high cards like Broadway holdings, high suited connectors, and mid to big pairs while folding out the small pairs from ep. You can’t go wrong following gto opening ranges which are east to find based on stack size.

Please get away from the nit it up when stack is big category. This is how you don’t win tournaments. You need to find “spots” to pick up chips that are long term +ev. The other day playing a small stakes live event with maybe 40-60bb, it goes open, flat, flat and I’m button or cu with K9cc. What do we do. We put a 3! In intending to fold to a 4!. What happened- I picked up 10bb when everyone folded in mid getting close to late stages of a tourny. A lot of passive folks would call and check fold most flops. Picking up 10bb when my stack may have been 50bb is gigantic. I’m perfectly comfortable playing post flop ip where I can cbet super small and put a villian to the test on a turn if they want to see extra streets.

Think live players tend to miss “spots” that they should be taking. Even 20-30bb jams over lp raisers. Just think- how easy is it to call off 20-30 bb with A-rag or kjo. It’s difficult. Gotta leverage your stack to what depth you are at and stage of tourny. If cu opens and I have 55 from sb with 25bb, stick it in against non super nitty omcs. Picking up spots like this where you avoid a flip and get a nice stack bump up without seeing all 5 is so so damn important. Think some folks in the live game not accustom to online play miss these spots all day.

It's the opposite.

Your chips are more valuable when you're short stacked, so you should not be playing looser pre; you should be cutting out the hands at the bottom of your range, and be more willing to 3-bet all-in over an open in a situation like CO/BT when you do play. Deeper, you can call and 3-bet with a wider range of hands and play more postflop. You shouldn't be flatting super wide in any case; deeper, you can 3-bet a lot of suited Broadways, suited aces, even suited connectors once in a while.

Pick up something like Modern Poker Theory or some other source for GTO ranges to see how this plays in practice.

This is mostly true, but not entirely so. My understanding is that the shape of the ranges changes as well as the percentage. When we have 15-20BB for example, hands like AT and KJ go up in value, while hands like 98s and small pairs go down, especially from OOP.

Yes, that's true. With that stack size you will pretty much be deciding whether to commit or fold on the flop, so your hand range changes a bit to favor strong top pair hands, whereas deep enough you may have more worries about being dominated there (although facing a cutoff raise from the button you can still play a lot of Broadway hands).

OP's ranges also ignore the value of suitedness. You flop a pair 30% of the time with unpaired cards; with suited cards you flop a flush draw 11% of the time. Ditch the bad offsuit aces and K8o/K9o, maybe even QTo / JTo, in favor of those Q9s/J9s/T9s hands. At 15BB you're getting it in on the flop with any good equity, so you want to give yourself a high chance to flop some. (You can't flop many top pairs with A6o.)

You also should figure out which of these hands should be shoves (or 3-bets at 30BB, though you can shove sometimes) and at what percentage. At 15BB your range should have mostly 3-bet jams and not a lot of calls. At 30BB you have a mix of calls, non-all-in 3-bets, and 3-bet shoves.