Final Table or Bust: Riding the Poker Tournament Bubble

How many times have you been in this poker tournament situation: the blinds are going up, in the opposite direction as your chip stack. You’ve been playing for a fairly long time, just not quite long enough to be in the money yet. You’re mentally fried and in desperate need of a miracle hand to get you back in the game. You’re on what we all so unfortunately know as… “the bubble” – a delicate tournament position that will make or break your longevity at the table, as well as your profit margin.

Obviously being on the bubble is not the ideal situation you want to find yourself in while playing a tournament. You want chips, and lots of them. You want to be the aggressor, stealing blinds and bullying the table with a comfortable lead over your opponents so that gambling on a small coin-flip or two won’t put much of a dent in your chip stack. You want to intimidate, am I right?

Well how intimidating can you get when your stack has dwindled down to a few big blinds? Regardless of how you got there – be it cold cards, bad beats, or just poor playing – when you’re short-stacked the amount of commotion you can cause with your chips is about on par with that of a free check from the big blind. Your decisions are often limited to either folding or pushing all-in, and post-flop play is not something you’ll need to be worrying about. The general rule of thumb for playing a short stack is to find a decent hand, pick a good spot to push, isolate opponents the best you can, and close your eyes and pray. Be happy if you only pick up some blinds, and just hope to see a weaker hand and pretty flop if you get called.

Being in the short-stack jam gets even tighter of course, when we add the bubble factor. For example, let’s say you’re playing in this year’s World Series of Poker main event tournament. You plopped down $10,000 large and you’ve been playing for five days straight, give or take a few hours of trying to sleep. You’re down to 412 players, and the top 400 get paid. Outlast 12 more players and you’re guaranteed at least double your buy-in money, but finish in 401st or worse, and sorry… no soup for you. Normally, with an average or above chip stack, this is a no sweat situation. Just be a little patient and avoid tangling with bigger stacks. But let’s make it fun here and say that you’re in 400th place with only fourteen big blinds – not much to play around with. You need to double up for sure – perhaps for three or four hands in a row to really put you back in the action. The question is do you sit back and muck everything except pocket Aces as you wait for those 12 unlucky souls to slowly bust out as the blinds and table bullies work you over, or do you make a stand and start taking chances with mediocre holdings?

The online solution, as some of you may have seen, is to sit idly as your clock runs all the way down, auto-folding all the hands you wouldn’t think of playing in a thousand years. Often referred to as slowrolling, this is perhaps one of the most annoying things that can happen on the virtual felt, and I wouldn’t recommend it if you’d like to continue playing wherever you do. Talking practical strategy now, I’d have to say that this is one of the toughest situations to develop a clear-cut plan for. The usual table dynamics come into play, particularly how the other bubble players are playing. Has everyone tightened up in general, holding their breaths and throwing away their cards until they’re guaranteed some green? Or have the table bullies taken over, taking advantage of passive short-stacks? Obviously it’s going to be hard to make a solid move at picking up some chips, say a late-position push with a medium pocket pair, with raises and re-raises in front of you. You have to be patient still, trying to inch closer and closer to the money, but at the same time to have to maintain your composure and make good plays. Don’t pass up pocket Queens in middle position because you’re afraid of running into Queens, Kings, or Aces. Take a chance and raise it up.

Remember the big picture here. Your goal in entering a tournament (or at least what your goal should be) is to win the whole damn thing, not to just barely creep into the money. This should be your focus throughout the tournament, even if you happen to find yourself on the bubble. Nobody plays for second place in any other type of competition, and your ideology for playing poker shouldn’t be any different.

Best of luck at the tables.

Mad Terp

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