Q&A #111: Committment With Tournament Stack Sizes
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Many tournament players make a consistent mistake. They focus too much on conserving their chips and preserving their “tournament life,” and in doing so they leave big pots hanging out to dry.
I see it frequently when I play tournaments. Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. The blinds are 200-400, and the big blind has 2500 chips. Someone raises to 1200, and the big blind calls. So the pot contains 2600 chips, and there is 1300 remaining. The flop comes KJ6 and the big blind bets out something like 500 into the 2600 pot. The preflop raiser will moves all-in for 800 more, and the big blind folds.
No matter what two cards the big blind held, he misplayed the hand. He disregarded the principle of commitment. I rarely see a mistake this flagrant in cash games, but in tournaments I see it relatively commonly because many players attach too much importance to “staying alive.”
Before I continue, I’ll briefly describe the principle of commitment. The basic idea is that once you’ve committed a significant fraction of your stack to a pot, you’re usually right to put the rest of it in rather than fold. Since you’ve built the pot up, you’ll typically be getting nice odds on the rest of your cash: 2-to-1, 3-to-1, or even better. Even if you figure to be an underdog in the hand, you’ll usually have enough equity to justify tossing the rest of your stack in and reverting to hope and pray mode.
What’s a “significant fraction of your stack”? A decent rule of thumb is one-third, but as with everything in poker, that number is flexible.
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Tags: committment, committment threshold, no-limit-holdem, poker, poker-tournaments, saving chips, stack-sizes, tournament life

“Pot Committed” is one of the greatest fallacies passed on from player to player to player to player to … and so on, for generations.