Below eleven big blinds you should be in “push/fold” mode, never raising unless you are going all-in. Trying to be tricky and make a small raise or limp in with a big hand is only useful if you are a very strong player facing a very weak player, and even then many of the best players avoid it. If you just go all-in or fold when the effective stack is eleven big blinds or less, you will avoid making costly mistakes.
The major reason why playing push/fold is correct at this level is that with smaller stacks we can quantify the game and play perfect poker. Knowing that you are playing perfectly is a rare thing in poker, but when you are heads up with a short stack the math is not complicated and we have created charts that allow you to play perfect poker very easily. This can be extremely useful, whether you’re competing in a live tournament, or simply practising your skills online at a site like Party Poker. No matter how your opponent plays, they can not win money against these charts in the long run. Their best hope is to play exactly the same way and break even against you. Luckily for those of us who use these charts, most of our opponents don’t know about them and tend to make significant mistakes when stacks get short.
If you are on the button, you can push all-in with the following hands based on the number of big blinds in the shorter stack. We know these ranges seem very wide, but they are mathematically proven, and experts playing against them are unable to beat them.
Shoving Ranges
When calculating a range to call your opponent’s all-in, the following chart is a good start and provides the same protection as the chart above. If you play this strategy, your opponent can only break even against you at best, and the vast majority of them won’t know about these charts and will make mistakes frequently. You can tighten up these ranges by about 5% if your opponent is much too tight, but otherwise it’s safest to just follow the chart once the stacks get short.
Calling Ranges
These charts provide a simple strategy that gives you a big advantage of your opponents when the blinds get big and the stacks are getting small. If you follow these charts you have the short stack portion of the heads up sit and go mastered.
#1 by Ryan on August 16, 2011 - 7:59 pm
The second paragraph is incorrect.
Shoving your charts as suggested above at 0-11bb poker should be unexploitable (I assume you just took the NASH charts and translated them into written ranges here), but is not perfect poker.
For example, a common tendency from opponents is that they will 3bet shove against a minraise much wider than they will call a shove. Therefore, you can get a lot more value out of certain hands by minraising and then calling versus always open shoving (almost always QQ, AQ type hands, but even K9s).
In fact, imagine an opponent that calls or shoves versus a minraise 11bb deep with hands such as 97, 98, T9, J9, Q9, K5-K8. If you minraise your K9s, you’ll get a lot more value out of those hands than by open shoving and seeing a lot of those hands just fold. It also should have little to no impact on your opponent’s stronger hands (KQ, KJ, KT, hands that beat K9s pretty handily), since those hands will call an open shove anyways.
Learning when and why to do something other than playing shove or fold at 11bb is very important and can bring you some healthy additional edge in your heads up sng games. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve ran into another type of opponent I wouldn’t just auto shove/fold against 11bb deep, the weak opponent. Folding OOP well over 50% of the time to a minraise, it can become a very simple and low risk, yet max edge strategy to simply minraise your entire range of hands. Opponents also tend to adjust less to minraising 100% of hands compared to open shoving 100% of hands.
There is also some merit in minraising against more passive preflop opponents (opponents that won’t 3bet shove often), as you can often pressure them postflop into folding too many pots.
To conclude, there are certainly a lot of ways and reasons to have a strategy other than “shove or fold” under 12bb. I would say that if you only shove or fold above 7bb ALWAYS, then you should reexamine your strategy because you’re leaving some edge on the table. This has changed somewhat over the years (it used to be widely believed to be 10bb or less = auto shove), but players such as Mersenneary have led the way in end game play, backing up their suggestions and results with logic and evidence.
Fortunately the game is not so simple, otherwise everybody could become really good really fast, it still takes a lot of work to be a good heads up sng poker player.