From Penthouse to Outhouse
Sometimes when I amass a large amount of chips in a tournament, a hand will come up where I forget that winning more chips means less than losing some chips. It is very easy to turn a big stack into an average stack in just one or two hands.
Lets say it is the middle rounds of a multi table tournament and you have just been fortunate enough to double your stack. You are now up to 6000 chips with the blinds at 100/200 ante 25. You have a large stack for this level and 2nd in chips at the table. The chip leader makes it 800 to go from UTG. You are on the button and look down at:
What do you do here? He has you covered in chips and is an aggressive, solid player. Lets look at your options:
- Reraise: If you reraise you would have to make it about 2k to 2400. If he moves in on you, you are in a quandry. You can call off the rest of your chips knowing there is a good chance you are dominated leaving you out of the tournament if you don’t catch up. Also if he calls your reraise and moves all-in on the flop, again you may have no idea whether you are ahead or behind. Online players are notorious for pushing in with an unimproved AK on the flop. If I chose to reraise pre-flop and the guy moved in on me I would have to fold leaving me with about 3500-4000 chips in my stack, which is not bad, but it is not nearly as comfortable as having 6k at that level.
- Call: There is an old poker saying “A bettor be. A caller never”, of course there is no such thing as never in the game of Poker but this is golden advice if you want to become a winning player. Calling the villain’s pre-flop raise only makes sense if you know this is a guy you can steal the pot from if he checks the flop. That would be the only reason to call his pre-flop raise here, and most good solid players do not fall into this category. Chances are he is leading at any flop and you on the button will have to fold 2/3 of the time. I am not reraising an UTG raiser with air. There is a time to do that but it is not at this level of the tournament. Worst case scenario when you just call his pre-flop raise is that and Ace or a Queen flops. Then it is going to be really tough to get away from the hand, and if the raiser has what an UTG raiser should have such as AA, KK, QQ, or AK, you could end up getting into a heap of trouble after the flop.
- Fold: Folding, in my opinion is the best option here for the safe play. As we said you want your opponents to react to you in Poker, and not vice-versa. To some this may seem like an overly tight play at first until they realize that at this level of the tournament it is much worse to lose 2ooo or more chips than to gain 2000.
The main point here is to not get into mediocre situations with a big stack. You may end up like Olaf Thorson in the 2003 WSOP. With three tables left he was the chip leader. All of a sudden he loses a coin toss and was back down to a near-average stack. The very next hand he moved all-in with KK on an Ace-high flop after Sammy Farha had led into him. BAM, he was out of the tournament, and the term:
“From Penthouse to Outhouse”
Became known not only to those in the poker world, but to all the ESPN viewers watching.
Be the leader of the action and pick the best spots you can. The Penthouse has a much better view than the latter.
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