High blind play during STT’s part 1

Some years ago I took a hiatus from my usual ring game play and studied STT’s and played in around 2000 of them or so. A combination of wanting a change and wanting to educate myself in other forms of poker led me to learn SNG play and especially STT’s. In this article I am going to discuss what I believe is one of the biggest mistakes made by novice players at this form of poker. I think that it is allowing yourself to be blinded out during the high blind phase of the tournament.

I think that there are more or less two major reasons for this and it is to do with not understanding ICM and being afraid to risk your tournament life unless you absolutely have to. There are certain key principles at work and in my experience then if you have a stack of between 3bb and 5bb then under no circumstances should you let the blinds ever hit you. Let us say that the blinds are 100-200 with five players left. You are the short stack and have T800 left.

If you are UTG then there is a clear case here for shoving any two cards. You ideally want to be called at worst by only one opponent. If you raise all in then it is possible that you could win the blinds without a showdown and that extra T300 in chips would get you at least the respite of seeing the next hand. The conclusion to this article will come in part 2.

Check our part 2 of this artcile: http://www.top15poker.com/news/news.php?id=165

Carl “The Dean” Sampson plays poker at www.pokerstars.co.uk