Playing an extremely conservative style when you're deep and waiting to get into the shorter stack territory that you're more familiar with will hurt your winning chances. This is precisely why you need to master the deep stack poker strategy if you aspire to become a good tournament player. The more blinds you have in your stack, the bigger the margin for error is. This means there is much more room for mistakes, which can be quite costly. You’ll have to play across multiple streets and make multiple decisions over any individual poker hand. The idea is to get as much money into the pot before the flop when you believe you’re ahead.Īs you get deeper, this starts to change. With 10 – 25 big blinds in your stack, there isn’t much room to play poker. When you're sitting on a short stack in an MTT, most of your decisions will revolve around preflop. To put it in the simplest of terms, playing deep is much harder and more demanding. Most cash game players know a lot about this topic, but those who prefer tournaments are often not too familiar with deepstack poker. The first thing to discuss is the difference between playing deep vs. In this article, I’ll give you some actionable deep stack poker tournament strategy tips to implement into your play.īy the time you're done reading, you'll have a much better understanding of what things to pay attention to in these scenarios, what are the biggest mistakes to avoid, and how to extract the most value in deep stack tournament situations. If you find yourself sitting with a big stack, most other players at your table might be short, but there will usually be one or two other large stacks to worry about. Knowing how to play correctly during these early levels can give you a significant edge over the competition, as players tend to make some pretty big mistakes in this phase.Īnother situation where you might be playing deepstack poker in an MTT is as you progress and accumulate chips. This applies in particular to the early levels of a tournament, as everyone starts with plenty of big blinds. While knowing your shove-fold ranges may be arguably more important, there will be plenty of spots where you’ll be playing deeper.

However, understanding the deep stack poker strategy is very important for MTT players as well.

For the most part, deep stack play is reserved for cash games, where it’s perfectly normal to sit with 200, 300, or even more big blinds in your stack.

When you think about deep stack poker, tournaments aren’t the first thing that comes to mind.

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