Small Ball Poker Tournament Strategy

Small ball poker is a move which involves minimising the size of pots during a hand. It’s been heavily exploited in Daniel Negreanu’s Poker strategy and it reduces the risks of committing large chunks of your stack, thanks to its effectivness as a good MTT strategy.

Pot Control

In order to minimise pot-sizes, small ball poker usually requires checking in at least one street on each hand. You’re either check-raising for value against a loose aggressive player, or you’re checking with a marginal hand for cheaper odds. In terms bet-sizing, you should be raising approximately 50% – 75% of what you would normally. A pre-flop raise of 2.5xBBs replaces the standard 3-4xBBs opening raise to eliminate limpers. Supposedly it does the same job but limits the size of the pot. Just watch Daniel Negreanu play poker and you’ll clearly see how he applies this poker strategy. Your c-bets should be 25% – 50% of the pot, and for maximising value on the river I’d look for around 50 – 75% pot size bet.

Advantages of Small Ball Poker Strategy

The most obvious reason for playing small ball poker is to limit how much it costs you to build pots and the risks involved.

In additional to this however, limiting the size of pots allows you to play more hands and limp more. Concepts such as block betting give you better odds for seeing further streets. And the final reason for making small bets is to gain more reads on your opponents and narrow their hand range. For instance, by checking out of position on the flop you can analyse the relatively strength of your opponent. It’s kind of weird because there’s still an ongoing debate about whether it’s worth betting for the sake of information, however in any case I can still see when this would be beneficial in some situations.

Limiting pot sizes generally increase your implied odds by allowing more players to get into pots. Because of this it, also increases the size of pots whilst limiting your own contribution i.e. giving you better odds to draw with.

Disadvantages of Small Ball Poker Strategy

Small ball poker is most effective for accomplished post-flop players. The downside to small ball play is that it allows more players to see flops cheaply. This means more players will be limping when you have premium hands like AA. To combat this you need to make sure that you are able to fold when you’re behind and sense when a player has hit the flop. For example, if I raise pre-flop 2.5xBBs in a tournament with AK and miss the flop with multiple callers, I’ve got to be able to fold on a board like 4h-5h-7d.

Another disadvantage is that smart players will latch on to what you’re doing. The idea of a block bet is that you raise enough to prevent a re-raise and limit the pot size. If you don’t get your min-raises right however, then you’ll end up getting hit back at –exactly the opposite of what you intended to happen.

Finally, small ball poker works best in loose games with experienced players, usually optimised in deep stack tournaments. Against micro-stakes players and fish I don’t recommend using it because in these games you get more value from over-betting and playing aggressively.

Conclusion on Small Ball Poker

This type of technique is most common among experienced/loose aggressive players in mid-high stakes games. In my opinion you don’t need to worry about when or if to use small ball poker because it’s such a niche and experimental type of play. Of course it has plenty of benefits, but it can be difficult master to perfection.