The Principles of Bubble Play

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The bubble is one of the most important stages of a tournament, and it’s also one of the easiest stages to get wrong. We’ve all had that feeling of getting all-in on the bubble, losing a coinflip, and wonderingwhether we really should have been getting in that kind of situation in the first place. In this article, I’ll be discussing a few of the key things you should be bearing in mind as we approach the bubble in tournament poker.

The buy-in does matter

One of the things it’s easy to lose track of in a world of ROIs, ITM% numbers and equity calculations is the idea that real-world monetary value does come into the equation at some point. Ultimately, your goal in poker isn’t to make the decisions that make you the most chips, it’s to make the decisions that make you the most money, and those two aren’t always the same thing (hence the existence of the concept of ICM).  This means that the decisions you make in higher-buyin tournaments are inherently more important than the ones you make in lower buyins. That’s not to say that you should play carelessly in lower-stakes tournaments, but it is to say that bubbling a $5 tournament and missing out on cashing for $7 is obviously less of a big deal than bubbling a $500 tournament and missing out on a $700 cash. Similarly, your ROI is likely to be much bigger in lower-stakes tournaments, so you can afford to take bigger risks on the bubble in order to capitalise on the edge you have on weaker players. Going to war with a well-known high-stakes tournament reg on the bubble of the WCOOP main event is something to avoid at all costs, but there are plenty of spots where people in lower-stakes tournaments will play far too cautiously in order to lock up their $7. Don’t forget, not everyone’s bank account uses the same currency in the real world, and to players in some countries cashing for $7 is worth a lot more than it might be to you!

The field size also matters

The size of the field in a tournament will often dictate how the bubble will play out. In tournaments such as the Sunday Million, where there are usually over 6,000 runners and over 1,000 places paid, the bubble can last for a very long time. This is because play tends to slow to a crawl when it gets to the point of 1,500 runners remaining, as the prospect of a $250 cash becomes enticing to those with short stacks, and stalling becomes an issue. With so many tables in play, no-one is able to keep track of the other stacks, or make decisions specifically based on action occurring on other tables, so they start stalling way ahead of where they might need to as a safeguard. In tournaments with smaller fields, you’ll find that it’s relatively easy to keep your eye on that guy with 2bb on another table, because he’s the obvious short stack, and you know that once he busts, the bubble bursts. In short, the smaller the field, the more aware every player is of exactly how close the bubble is, and with larger fields, no-one knows where they stand. This means that while a tournament that pays 50 players might not start adapting to the bubble until 55 players or fewer remain, a tournament that pays hundreds of spots may have a bubble that lasts an hour or more, and requires dozens of players to bust. It’s important that you adapt your play accordingly, and anticipate the arrival of the bubble stage at the correct time.

Approaching the bubble as the big stack

If you have all the chips going into the bubble, obviously you’re in great shape. You don’t need to worry about being the guy who goes out right before the money – you’ve essentially got it locked up. I say ‘essentially’, because your number one priority going into the bubble stage should be not to do anything stupid and put yourself at risk! If you have 90bb and the chip leader has 100bb on the exact bubble, don’t get your whole stack in with Ace-King. Don’t 3bet him with the old Jack-deuce suited just because you feel like it. Just play straightforwardly against those stacks who can put you at risk – you don’t want to be risking a huge stack on the bubble of a big tournament without having more or less the nuts. On the other hand, the difference between you having a 90bb stack and the other guy having 100bb and vice versa, is actually surprisingly big. Sure, you still don’t want to be risking 90% of your stack at any point, but the fact that you have the power to put the other guy’s stack at risk if you want to and still have a chance to survive the bubble is going to ensure that they play much more straightforwardly versus you. Remember, if you’re a good player and they’re a good player, they’re probably going to be applying the same logic you would in their spot. They don’t want to mess around with the only bigger stack, so you can occasionally take advantage of this.

Approaching the bubble as a medium stack

This is the situation you’re going to find yourself in the majority of the time. Depending on the structure of any given tournament, having a ‘medium stack’ might mean having 15bb (if it’s a turbo), 30bb, or 50bb if it’s a deep-stack event. The key concept behind playing this stack size is to identify two things – firstly, the shorter stacks who you can force into difficult decisions, and secondly, the players with similar stacks to yourself who are simply more scared of bubbling the tournament than you are. When considering the former, try to take advantage of spots where players behind you are handcuffed by their stack size. For example, if you have 30bb in middle position and every stack behind you is between 12bb-18bb and you’re approaching the bubble, it doesn’t matter what your hand is – it’s very unlikely anyone behind you can call and make you play postflop. This means you can raise/fold literally any two cards, since they all have to either go all-in or fold, and fold is by far the most likely option. They may not be willing to get it all-in with less than, say, pocket eights or Ace-Queen, in which case any two cards will be an insanely profitable open-raise. With the latter of the two considerations outlined above, don’t be afraid to pick on any one player you identify as being scared of bubbling. If there’s a stack roughly equal to yours but the guy has blinded himself down from 50bb over the last hour, he’s probably a pretty tight player – don’t be afraid to open on his big blind with a much wider range of hands than you normally would from that position. This doesn’t mean opening Queen-four suited under the gun necessarily, but it might mean opening seven-six suited if you’d usually fold it.

Approaching the bubble as a short stack

This is where it gets tricky. There are certain spots when, approaching the bubble as a short stack, you are simply going to have to put yourself at risk of bubbling the tournament. This is unavoidable. It’s not much fun when it happens, but after a certain point, it becomes necessary. When other players at your table are doing as you would be with a bigger stack, and exploiting the bubble and the stack sizes behind them by opening very wide ranges, your fold equity is going to be so high that sometimes it’s just too much of a profitable play to turn down. For example, imagine an aggressive high-stakes tournament regular opens the button from a 40bb stack, and you’re in the big blind. You and the small blind both have 15bb stacks. You look down at pocket fours. It’s highly likely the player on the button is literally opening any two cards in that spot, as well as probably raise-calling the top of his range and open-shoving the middle of it. Assuming that he raise-calls the top 10% of hands, open-shoves the next 30%, and raise-folds the bottom 60% (this sort of range-splitting is pretty common among tournament regulars playing against unknowns – it may change if the regular on the button knows your game very well, or the small blind’s game), it means he’s only calling a shove from either blind roughly 14% of the time. This means that not only is shoving pocket fours in that spot going to get through 86% of the time, but you’ll also have decent equity (probably 35-40%) against his calling range when he does call. This makes it just too profitable of a spot to turn down, given the huge fold equity we have. Note that if you did not have fold equity in this spot, your pure equity would not be enough to justify the shove, and if he open-shoved, the fact that you were at risk for our tournament on the bubble would make it a fold. It’s the fold equity that makes it profitable, and this applies to a number of spots. It applies to both open-shoving and re-shoving. If you have significant fold equity and good equity when called, it’s probably a good spot to get it all-in, even despite the bubble. If you have the chance to open-shove and put the stacks shorter than yourself at risk, even better, because their lack of fold equity means they have to call extremely tight as the bubble approaches. In short, as the short stack on the bubble, fold equity is key. If you still have a lot of it, there’s not too much to worry about.

Approaching the bubble as a micro stack

This is the nightmare scenario. You get to the bubble stage in a big tournament and you have 10bb or less – no fold equity on a reshove, and not that much on an open-shove. Maybe you have even fewer chips than that, and you can’t even expect to get your last few big blinds in without pricing the big blind in to call. At this point, you’re not thinking about building a stack or winning the tournament – you’re thinking about one thing and one thing only, making the money. You do whatever it takes to get there – if it means stalling and using up your entire timebank until the one guy with fewer chips than you busts out, then that’s what you do. You have no ambition beyond sneaking into the money spots, and anything beyond a mincash is a huge bonus. At this point you can afford to treat the tournament a little like a satellite – everything depends on how many short stacks there are and what their situation is. If you have 4bb and open-folding an ace on the button will almost guarantee you a spot in the money because there’s a guy at the other table who has one ante left and is going to be all-in for the next three hands even if he wins the first two, then so be it. Conversely, there are some situations where you’re just going to have to get your chips in with no fold equity and hope for the best – if you have 4bb and the next smallest stack is 12bb, it’s going to be a while before anyone else is at risk. You’re better off putting your chips in with the first good hand you pick up, and praying for a triple up so you can stick around a little bit longer.

The final table bubble

Final table bubbles play a little bit different to regular bubbles, because obviously they involve far fewer players, and each player usually has a much better perception of what’s going on at that particular point, and of his or her own role in the tournament. The big stack is inevitably going to open a lot of pots and play a lot of hands, the short stacks are going to fold a lot while they wait for the others to bust, and the middle stacks are going to try not to cannibalize each other before the short stacks bust out. If you’re playing online and you’re approaching the final table of a major tournament, it is an absolutely criminal error not to watch the other tables as you get down to the end. Even if you’re playing other tables at the time, you shouldn’t be playing so many that you can’t at least open the other table when you get down to the final two tables, and pay attention to how each player is playing and who the shortstacks are. This awareness will help you not only to make the best decisions in the context of each individual hand, but also in the context of the entire tournament – if you’re a big stack and the other big stack in the tournament is at the other table and happens to be a weaker player who’s playing way too many hands and never folding to anyone’s bets or raises, going into the final table without this knowledge could lead you to make a huge mistake against the only other player with the power to really hurt you. Information is key in poker, and no more so than in the later stages of a big tournament.

A final thought

The last word on the bubble stage of a poker tournament is very simple – if you play a lot of poker, you are going to bubble a lot of tournaments. You’re going to bubble in ridiculous ways, losing with pocket Aces in chiplead pots, getting Aces with your last half a big blind in the middle and still losing, being completely card dead for an hour and blinding down from a workable 30bb stack to a 5bb stack and bubbling, and every other combination of nasty bad beats you can imagine. You’re going to final table bubble a lot of big tournaments, miss out on a lot of big final tables, cost yourself some money, take some horrific bad beats and lose some painful coinflips. That’s tournament poker. The only thing you can do is just accept it, move on, and know that if you keep putting yourself in the right positions, you’ll make big scores in the end. If you’re serious about poker, expecting to never bubble a tournament or never final table bubble a tournament is about as realistic as expecting to get pocket Aces every hand for the rest of your life. Understand the dynamics of the bubble, understand the realities of the bubble, and you’ll be able to crush the bubble stages of all your tournaments to come.