Jonathan Little recently gave out three hacks on his YouTube channel for crushing low-stakes poker tournaments. With almost $9 million in live earnings, WPT wins, and about 20 years of experience, he seems like a good source of information. The first one is quite simple, but the next two take a bit more practice.
Jonathan – Live poker, in particular, is booming, and if you want to gain an edge in low-stakes tournaments, you have to work and study harder than your opponents. So here are my top three hacks today for crushing the small-stakes games.
Hack #1: Show Up On Time
Hack number one is to show up on time. This may sound simple and easy, but many poker players, for lack of better words, are lazy. They want to show up last second, register last second, then play for an hour or two and see what happens. But that is a big mistake because to have the biggest edge, you want to play deep stacked against the weakest players in the field. And it turns out a lot of the weakest players show up on time because they don't know how to play poker very well. This is an exciting day for them. They're going, they want the full experience, and then they're playing deep stack and they don't know what they're doing.
Fortunately for you, some very strong players who are a little bit lazy aren't there to take advantage of it. If you are there playing deep stack though against bad players, you have the potential to have a huge win rate. And you're also going to find that as stacks get shorter and shorter, especially if you buy in very late, it's very difficult to have any sort of gigantic edge. When a lot of these very good players buy-in at the last second, they hope to have a 10% return on investment.
But if you show up on time against very weak players in a relatively slow-structured tournament, you can easily have a 50% return on investment or more because a lot of those weak players' stacks are going to go right to you.
Now certainly sometimes you are going to lose early. That happens, it's okay. More often than not, if you have a big skill edge over your weak opponents, the money is going to flow in your direction.
Hack #2: Play Big Pots in Position
Position is everything in poker. You don't build a big stack by playing a ton of pots passively from out of position. You cannot be loosey and goosey and eat sandwiches all day, it does not work. You need to play big pots in position.
You run deep consistently by 3-betting frequently from in position, controlling the size of the pot when it makes sense with your medium-strength hands, and stealing a lot of pots that don't belong to you, especially when it's kind of obvious your opponents are not interested in the pot.
You may say, "How do we steal pots?"
Well, you steal pots that don't belong to you by 3-betting with a polarized range. You want to be 3-betting with a polarized range because your opponent's not going to know if you have a really good hand or a marginal hand, and that's going to put them in a guessing game.
You also steal a lot of pots that don't belong to you by continuation betting using a small size more often than the game theory optimal strategy would recommend. You're going to find that almost no one check-raises often enough from out of position against small continuation bets. So you can continuation bet small, and when they do raise, you'll fold all your garbage, but more often than not, your opponents are either going to fold or call. And if they call with a wide range, you can barrel them on the turn and river.
So you're going to find that you're going to want to be double-barreling these players often, especially with draws that have some equity to improve to a very strong hand. Because every once in a while, you get lucky and you make the nuts. And you especially want to be betting the turn often when the board is good for your range.
Say you raise and the big blind calls and the flop comes . They check, you bet, they call. If the turn is an , a , or a (which you could easily have) and they check, you should be betting pretty much with everything no matter what you have, even if you don't have a draw. Because they're not going to check-call the flop with a whole lot of Kings or Queens or Ace-high, they're just going to fold a lot of the time.
And the nice thing about this is even if they do happen to have an and they happen to make top pair, realize sometimes they're going to have middle pair and worse or some sort of junky draw, and they're going to fold all of those when the comes. So yeah, you don't win every single pot this way, but you will win far more than your fair share.
Hack #3: Stop Hero Calling on the River
Hack number three is to stop hero calling on the river. How many times have you seen someone tell the table that they just have to call and see it? They say, "Oh well, I'm probably beat, but I got to call this."
This is perhaps the number one leak of low-stakes tournament players. They have a big ego, they may not think they do, but they have a big ego and they have to prove that they're unlucky or prove that they knew it. But that's asinine, don't make asinine blunders.
If you're never getting bluffed, you're calling way too often. To be fair, look, it's easy to not get bluffed. Just call every time, and then you always catch their bluffs. The problem is you always pay off their value bets. And if you're paying off all of your opponent's value bets and they don't bluff quite often enough, which most people in most games don't bluff often enough, well, you're paying off your opponents poorly.
Realize you do not have to see it. You've seen it plenty, you've seen their good hands plenty. Most people, especially in the small-stakes games, simply do not bluff often enough on the river. Even in the high-stakes games, people do not bluff often enough on the river. So if they're not bluffing often enough on the river, you should fold what? Well, all of your bluff catchers, simple as that.
If you cannot beat any of their value hands and you know they do not bluff often enough, all the bluff catchers become unprofitable calls. And if a call is unprofitable, every time you make it, you're losing a little bit of money to your opponents, even if they do bluff every once in a while.
Practice Some of These Concepts Online
Jonathan Little plays live and online, but this guide is focused on live tournament hacks. That being said, playing big pots in position and refining your river hero-call range aren't just for live games. They both apply to online MTTs and SNGs too.
ACR PokerIf you need somewhere inexpensive and casual to practice Jonathan Little's hacks, just enter into any of the freerolls we post every day. Without exaggeration, there are thousands of dollars in events on some days, across many of the top poker sites. Sign-up isn't a slow process and you can get some free practice in, but hang on tight through those early stages. Since the buy-in is free to all, the beginning of freerolls can be a bit hectic. Later on, the style of play will reach normal levels and you'll be in a prime spot to implement new strategies.
Remember Those Three Small-Stakes Tournament Tips
So that is it, short, simple, sweet. These are three gigantic hacks to crush the small-stakes tournaments:
1. Show up on time. I'm telling you, you're leaving a lot of money on the table if you do not show up on time ready to play.
2. Play big in position. Don't be afraid to get in there and battle when you are in the most advantageous positions. The opposite of this to some extent is be a little bit more careful out of position. From out of position, play tight.
3. Stop hero calling on the river. Your opponents do not bluff often enough, especially when they make large river bets. So drastically overfold.