Poker Strategy - Bubble Play In Texas Holdem Poker Tournaments

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Bubble Play in Texas Holdem poker Tournaments

An issue that you hopefully will have to face many times in your poker career is what to do in a no limit Texas Holdem poker tournament as you near the bubble. The bubble refers to the first spot that gets paid according to the prize distribution. If 45 people get paid in a poker tournament, the person who gets knocked out 46th is said to have gone out "on the bubble." There are some very specific strategies for handling bubble play in Texas Holdem tournaments.

You will have to decide whether you are playing the tournament in order to simply cash, or if you are trying to win. Many players have as their goal simply surviving to get into the money. While making the money is nice, this is generally not sound poker tournament strategy. Due to the nature of poker tournaments, you will in all likelihood fail to cash in more tournaments than you cash, so you really want to make your cashes count. However, in some cases where the buy in is quite high, simply cashing can represent a substantial win. Making the bubble in a $200 buy in poker Texas Holdem poker tournament can mean a profit of little more than $100 or so, whereas making the bubble in a $10,000 buy in tournament can represent a win of thousands, even more if you got into the tournament through a satellite.

If you have a large stack near the bubble, now is the time to get aggressive. You should attack unrelentingly. You should

be stealing blinds and antes at every opportunity and should go after the medium stacks mercilessly. You should not target the short stacks, although it will often be worth it for you to call a short stack all in, even if you think you have a little bit the worse of it. When you put pressure on medium stacks, they will often feel forced to fold, not wanting to walk away with nothing when other players are close to being blinded out of the tournament and breaking the bubble. On the other hand, short stacks will often feel compelled to call you since they are the players in danger.

If you are a short stack on the bubble of a Texas Holdem tournament, you have probably decided you just want to cash, although you might also have just lost a big pot as the bubble approaches. If you are committed to winning, you should start to take bigger chances as the blinds begin to threaten your stack, so that you do not end up in a short stack bubble situation. If you are a short stack in this situation, assess the likelihood one of the other short stacks will go out before you do. If it seems likely that you will be blinded out of the money first, you will have to find a place to move in your chips and go with it. If you're lucky, you can double up and then hang back and wait for another player to break the money bubble for you.

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