As stacks get deeper in poker, we have to change and adjust our strategy accordingly to achieve the best results.
When thinking about how and why this happens, there are three main aspects to consider:
- Position becomes more important as equity realization shifts more to the player in position
- Nut advantage affects your strategy more – the ability to make the nuts on turns and rivers goes in value
- Your stack-off threshold gets substantially higher
These three aspects motivate all significant strategy changes and adjustments required as stacks get deeper, so let’s get into it in reverse order.
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Adjustment #1: Increasing Stack-Off Threshold
When we are playing with 100 big blinds or less, we are usually happy to get all our money in the middle with a top pair. So, with a hand like K♥9♥, we can easily stack off on a board such as K♣7♦2♠.
However, as we get deeper, things start to change. At 200+ big blinds, even a hand as strong as KQ may not be good enough to play for it all. If your opponent is willing to risk all their chips in this type of scenario, they’ll often have a strong hand (two pair or better) that has us in trouble.
Thus, we need to adjust our strategy by focusing on these three points:
- In situations when you lack nut advantage, c-bet & check/raise frequency go down significantly
- Pot control becomes more important in spots where the board is likely to change significantly
- The cost of reopening the action on the river as the IP player gets higher, especially when the OOP opponent can have the nuts and check-raise
Let’s look at an example of a button raise against the big blind on the 10♦8♣6♥ flop.
If you look at the picture below, you’ll notice that you should be checking back a lot more often when 200 big blinds deep as opposed to 100 big blinds.
This is especially the case for medium-strength hands that bet at 100 big blinds but prefer to check when playing with deeper stacks.
By the same token, we bet fewer bluffs, i.e. hands like king-highs and queen-highs.
Let’s now look at the same board, but in a lojack vs. button setup, after we check the button bets 33% of the pot.
At 100 big blinds, we are raising a fairly big percentage – around 17%; at 200 big blinds, that number goes down significantly.
You don’t want to check-raise with jacks or even kings because if you do and your opponent sticks around, you don’t love that situation. They’ll have all the sets and high equity draws in these situations, so we have to exercise some pot control.
Adjustment #2: Be Careful When Reopening Action on the River
When you check back the river in position, you’ll realize your equity 100% of the time as you’ll get to show down your hand.
When you bet the river, there is the cost involved, since you’ll get check-raised sometimes, forcing you to fold and relinquish your equity. As stacks get deeper, the cost of reopening the action on the river gets higher, as the OOP player can use large sizing to apply the maximum pressure.
So, as you get deeper, you want your hands to have more and more equity on the river for them to be profitable value bets.
In the same vein, you want to look out for people who value bet too thinly in these scenarios and punish them for this by check-raising when playing out of position.
Let’s look at an example. We are playing $5/$10 and everyone has $2,500 (250 big blinds). We open from the hijacak with K♥Q♥ and the big blind calls.
The flop comes K♠J♠7♥. The big blind checks, we c-bet $40, and they call. The turn is the 5♦, and they check once more.
This is the spot where betting is mandatory, given the dynamic board, and we want to use a big sizing. So, we bet the full pot ($145) and get called once more.
The river comes the 8♦, and the big blind checks one final time.
This is a great example of a runout where you absolutely cannot value bet the river playing 250 big blinds deep against a good player who you don’t believe to be a calling station.
It may seem nitty, but it is, in fact, necessary against good and aggressive opponents who are aware of what’s happening. Reopening the action in these spots will cost you money in the long run.
Pushing Your Equity With Deep Stacks
I often hear my students say, “I didn’t think my hand was worth three streets, so I checked the turn.” This may get you by in a lot of scenarios, especially against less skilled opponents, but this is not a sound strategy.
Instead, you’ll do much better with a bet/bet/check line, which allows you to:
- Clean up equity (get the opponent to fold hands with reasonable amounts of equity)
- Don’t get raised as often
- Don’t allow your opponent to realize their EV by bluffing rivers after checking turns
Let’s look at a breakdown of the J♠7♠6♥5♦ board, where the button opens before the flop and c-bets the flop and the big blind calls.
On the 5♦ turn, the big blind checks. What hands should we continue betting with? Primarily, we want to utilize hands that can improve to the nuts, so flush draws and hands containing an eight or a nine.
Interestingly, at deep stacks, a lot of hands containing a six also prefer betting at a very high frequency on the turn.
We can get away with these bets because it is very hard for the opponent to raise you and get too much out of the line to put you in a tough spot. And, by betting, we get the opponent to fold hands that have a lot of equity.
If the opponent calls and the river comes something like the 10♥, we can check back a lot of hands that we bet on the turn (such as a pair of sixes or J8) to realize our equity.
Adjustment #3: Check More Out of Position
Position becomes increasingly more valuable as stacks get deeper since the in-position player gets to decide if they want to put in an additional bet.
Playing out of position, there are almost no boards that you should be betting all the time to avoid check-raising.
Additionally, when betting, you will want to size up and add more overbets to your arsenal.
Playing 200+ big blinds deep, you can also start to diversify your flop betting strategies by adding a third sizing; for example, you can have 33%, 66%, and 100% pot-sized bets.
Let’s look at the flop of A♠8♥3♥, where we raise from the lojack and the button calls.
Looking at the GTO strategy in the above picture, we see that we actually start with a flop check 91% of the time when playing 200 big blinds deep.
We are out of the position, and the hands that are very strong on the flop will often not be the nuts by the river. For this reason, you have to protect your checking range, which means checking even with some very strong hands.
If we take another similar spot (LJ vs. BTN) but on a king-high flop, i.e. K♠7♠4♥, our strategy changes somewhat, but we are still doing a lot of checking.
At 200 big blinds, we are checking around 60% of the time. Since we don’t have much of a range advantage, we should be betting with a nice polarized range and checking a lot to control the size of the pot.
Playing out of position is always tricky, but as stacks get deeper, the importance of positional awareness increases exponentially. There is more room for our opponents to apply pressure and put us in tough spots, which dictates a more conservative strategy focused on range protection and pot size control.
