Size Matters in No-Limit Tournament Strategy

First of all, your exposure to risk, as well as your ability to subject your opponents to risk, is limited, not by a restriction on the bet amount, but by the amount of chips you have in front of you. That's why I think a better name for "no-limit" would be "table-limit." The size of your stack has a huge impact on your strategy and that of your opponents.

If you have more chips on the table than the rest of the players, you benefit from a positive feedback that makes you a favorite to win:

1. Prospective opponents will be wary of your capability to put them all-in if you have a good hand. Thus, they will have a tendency to fold anything but the strongest hands when you bet or raise substantially. This drastically increases not only your chances of winning with strong cards immediately but your chances of bluffing successfully. It also reduces the likelihood that opponents will play pure drawing hands against you, which protects you from some of the luck of the draw.

2. Once you are ahead, you have earned yourself the luxury of being able to play hands only when you have the best of it.

3. But you can't afford to sit on the sidelines and allow yourself to be overtaken by successful rivals. Your best strategy is to stay ahead of the pack by playing cautiously, with the goal of having a big chip lead when it comes down to just you and your final opponent.

On the other end of the spectrum, if you are low on chips in comparison to the table, you will feel relentless pressure from numerous directions:

1. The ever-increasing blinds will force more and more of your stack into play each time they come around, which will force you to defend those blinds with increasing audacity or desperation.

2. Since you don't present as much of a danger to other players, they will play a much wider assortment of hands against you, particularly draws, in the reasonable hope of getting lucky. In fact, when you are so low on chips that opponents realistically have nothing to lose by forcing you to go all-in to call, they will do exactly that, as long as they have cards that are better than average.

3. Maddeningly, you will have to call them most of the time. This is because when you are short-stacked, you can't afford to fold, or give up "equity" in the pot, as this is sometimes called, as much as a player who is ahead.

Overcoming a short stack is a key skill in this game. You shouldn't panic every time you are below average, but when you are clearly trailing the pack and each pass of the blinds is taking a significant portion of your stack, you need to resign yourself to the fact that you will lose unless you do something drastic and get lucky doing it. Each pass of the blinds reduces your ability to shape the hands that you play, so it is better to act when you have enough chips left to make opponents think about calling you. Tightening up when you are behind will only prolong your demise. Instead, loosen up and focus on trying to see flops whenever you can do so cheaply. As soon as you sense any relative advantage over your opponents, including a good bluffing opportunity, you should put in big bets or raises and make them decide how much they want to risk to eliminate you. You will often take those pots uncontested, which will put a few more blinds in your stack and buy you some time and flexibility. If you have made a genuine bet and get called, you should have a reasonable chance of winning. And if you get caught bluffing or lose to a better hand, at least you went down fighting. The longer you wait to make a move, the less effective that move will be because of your smaller stack. Waiting for strong hands when you are short-stacked is the most certain, if not the shortest, path to going bust.