Q&A #91: Playing a Big Stack in Multitable No-Limit Tournaments

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Last week we celebrated one year of NPA, and I offered a contest. Ask the best question on the message boards within a week, and win a signed copy of each of my books and DVDs.

We have a winner! Congratulations to Shrike for his question about MTT Standards.

Ed, since you’ve spent considerable time working on hand selection charts for NL cash games, I thought I would ask about adapting them to multi-table NL tournament play. Recently I was playing in an online tourney with a field of roughly 85 players (with a $26 buyin) and was the chipleader with 30 players remaining. My goal was to protect my chipstack and patiently watch as the escalating blinds caused the field to thin in the third quarter of the event, before the final table took shape. Unfortunately, I blundered and lost two big pots I should never have been involved in and I was eliminated in 25th place.

As far as I can see, I made two specific errors in the two hands.

1) I defended my big blind to a raise with 88 and doubled up a medium stack when I bluffed with my unimproved underpair on a board of K96Q when a possible spade flush came in;

2) I played AT for a raise on the button instead of safely folding preflop. Instead, I flopped top and bottom pair on an AQT flop and lost to a set of tens.

Each time, I called a raise in a dangerous situation and lost the maximum.

So, my question is what hand standards would you suggest (especially if you are calling a PF raise) in the middle stages of a large tournament when the chief objective is to protect a large stack?

Your question reflects what I think is a general psychological hangup people have in MTTs.

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