The SBP Archives - Your less than frequent dose of SBP!

If you have 1/2 or more of your chips in the pot, you're going with it. It doesn't matter what two cards you're holding, but if you've found yourself in a situation where you are either one of the blinds and you have so few chips left it pretty much represents your entire stack, or if you enter a pot with a call or raise that leaves you few chips to play with, you're essentially announcing to the table you're in the hand and you're going to see all five cards in the community if someone elects to play with you.

I see so often players who limp into the pot when they hardly have any chips left, but then fold if someone raises them. So if they limped in with a 150 chip bet, and someone raises on top of that, they decide to fold their hand and keep their remaining 75 chips. This doesn't make any sense. When you have a severely low chip stack, you are either all-in or all-out.

The other night when playing three handed, the big blind was down to a few remaining chips. The first player folded and the small blind went all-in, essentially forcing the big blind to put her remaining chips in the pot (a correct play, regardless of what the small blind was holding). Instead, she decided to fold. With her big blind already in the pot, that represented about 2/3 of her remaining stack. Her next hand she would be the small blind and she couldn't even cover that. No matter what two cards she held as the small blind for the next hand, she'd be forced to play it. So why not just put your remaining chips in the middle, and at the very least if you get lucky and do win the hand, you win a decent sized pot that'll allow you to continue? Put it this way: if on the next hand you land pocket Aces, how much can you really win? Since you're down to LESS the small blind, in my example if all three players enter the pot and the short stack did win, she'd win an amount about the size of one big blind. But if she just went all-in with her big blind and her remaining chips the hand previous, she'd have an opportunity to win a pot more than 2x the big blind and could survive a few more hands.

In the above example, the raiser held pocket 8s. The big blind held 10-7. In any other circumstance I'd say fold, but if you're pot commited, you're pot commmited. For fun, we played out the cards, and three tens hit the board! If she had went all-in with her remaining chips, she would have had the winning hand with quad tens!!! But her overtly-conservative play cost her, and she was out the next hand when her opponent (me!) made a full house.

You might not like it, but sometimes you have no choice. You would have likely busted out later anyway, so you might as well put your remaining chips in when your stack commits you to do so.