Do you open roughly the same range from each position regardless of antes? If so, you
are making a costly 🏵 mistake.
Many players leak chips by failing to adjust their preflop
ranges when there’s dead money to go after. With antes 🏵 in play, the pot is roughly 40%
bigger preflop. This means we need to play much looser than we do 🏵 when there are no
antes in play.
Today we’ll go through some examples to see how our open-raising range
changes from 🏵 early, middle, and late positions, depending on whether antes are in play
or not.
Don’t treat the ranges below as if 🏵 they are set in stone–no ranges are.
Instead, use them as a guide when building your own preflop strategy. But 🏵 first, let’s
take a look at what an ante is.
What is an Ante?
Ante refers to a mandatory bet
required of 🏵 all players before any cards are dealt, which encourages action by
incentivizing players to be aggressive. Antes are commonly found 🏵 in tournaments and
high stakes cash games.
Antes vs. No Antes: The Math
If there is a standard ante in
play and 🏵 we open for 2.25bb, we need to pick up the pot less than half of the time to
show an 🏵 immediate profit.
To show why we should be opening looser with antes in play,
let’s look at an example:
9-Handed Poker Tournament. 🏵 Blinds 250/500/50.
Hero is dealt
two cards on the button
folds to btn. Hero raises to 1,125.
Before we raised, the pot
was 🏵 1,200 with the blinds and antes (250+500+450), and we are only risking 1,125 with
our raise. Therefore, our open needs 🏵 to take down the blinds 48.4% of the time to make
an immediate profit (what we are risking/total pot). And 🏵 this doesn’t account for the
times we win the pot postflop.
If there were no antes, the total pot would be 🏵 just 750
chips. Therefore, our raise would need to work 60% of the time to make an immediate
profit. This 🏵 10.6 percentage point increase is quite the difference, and should
drastically impact how we think about our open-raise range.
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Now, let’s take a look at some specific ranges.
Note that the
ranges we will be looking at are for low-to-mid 🏵 stakes online tournaments or standard
live tournaments, and they don’t account for specific adjustments we can make depending
on our 🏵 given situation (the players behind, who’s in the big blind, etc). We are also
assuming a 30bb+ effective stack size.
Early 🏵 Position Range Example: UTG1
Let’s start
with how our early position range is impacted.
From UTG1, we are opening approximately
10% pre-ante 🏵 (see below). This is a very tight range, but necessary so with no antes
from early position. This is similar 🏵 to a cash game environment where antes are rarely
present.
When antes come in to play, we can nearly double our 🏵 opening range, to
approximately 20% of hands. We are now opening all the suited aces, all pocket pairs,
and some 🏵 more suited connectors and offsuit broadways.
Middle Position Range Example:
LoJack
From the LoJack we want to open ~16% of hands pre-ante:
Once 🏵 there are antes, we
can profitably open ~28% of hands, including all broadways and many suited gappers.
Here’s a reasonable 🏵 example of such a range:
Late Position Range Example:
Cutoff
Finally, here’s a reasonable cutoff raising range with no antes (26% of
🏵 hands):
Now, take a moment to consider which hands you might add into this range with
antes. Once you’re finished, click 🏵 below to see what I came up with
Adjusting Ranges
with Information
Again, these range recommendations don’t account for our opponents’
particular 🏵 tendencies. Here are 2 questions you should always ask yourself before
putting in a raise:
Who are the players behind?
If there 🏵 are tough, aggressive regulars
behind, we will need to adjust and tighten our range. Tough players will be the
quickest 🏵 to realize we are opening too loose and punish us by increasing their 3-bet
frequency.
On the other hand, if the 🏵 players behind are weak and passive, we can loosen
our opening range without much concern of facing a 3-bet.
Who is 🏵 the player in the big
blind?
If the player in big blind is weak or passive then we want to loosen 🏵 up and take
advantage of them folding too many hands. Against loose and aggressive players in the
big blind, tighten 🏵 up and consider using a slightly larger open size to make their pot
odds worse.
Button and Big Blind Antes
Button and 🏵 big blind antes are a hot topic. Many
tournament formats are moving toward this style, and many professionals approve. There
🏵 is some debate about whether the ante should be paid by the button or the big blind,
however, but we’ll 🏵 leave that discussion for another day.
A button or big blind ante is
simply where the button or big blind posts 🏵 the entire ante for the table. This is done
in lieu of the tradition way of collecting antes, where each 🏵 player posts 1/9th of the
total ante (assuming a 9-handed game) each hand. There are two major advantages to
having 🏵 the button or big blind posts the entire ante:
it reduces the need for smaller
chip denominations
it speeds up live tournaments
How 🏵 should we adjust our strategy if
we are playing in this type of ante format? It might seem like it 🏵 needs to change,
since just one player is posting the entire ante each hand.
The truth is, when playing
30bb+, our 🏵 strategy does not need to change much. The pot size is still exactly the
same, and we are still posting 🏵 the same amount in antes each orbit. Therefore, our
open-raise range should remain roughly same in either ante format.
There is 🏵 one spot to
adjust, though: when we are playing with a short stack. We may need to loosen our
shoving 🏵 ranges depending on stack-size and if the full ante is approaching. For
example, if we have 10bb and the big 🏵 blind/big blind ante is approaching, then we may
want to loosen our shoving range before this to avoid 20% of 🏵 our stack being committed
in one hand before even being dealt any cards.
There is likely some meta-game to be
aware 🏵 of as many players are not familiar with this format yet. You should look for and
exploit players who are 🏵 over-adjusting. For example, you may realize the button or
cutoff is now opening way too loose with a big blind/button 🏵 ante in play. You can take
advantage in the blinds by increasing your 3-bet percentage.
Conclusion
To sum up: try
to differentiate 🏵 your ranges into pre-ante and post-ante, because it does really make a
difference. And don’t be a nit when antes 🏵 come into play. Go after that dead money!
As
always, I’m happy to review and discuss today’s topic in the comments 🏵 below.
Note: Want
to upgrade your poker skills? Get free preflop charts here and start playing like a pro
before the 🏵 flop. Download now!
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