♣  Small Ball strategy

Small Ball strategy is a NL Holdem tournament strategy. It is especially suited to deep stack tournaments with a slow blind structure and the approach can even be adapted to deep stack cash games. Notice that deep stack is the important word here. The small approach involves playing a relative wider range of hands and being active in competing for pots (or more accurately.. being very selectively aggressive). But playing a wide range of hands cannot be justified mathematically on the basis of bluffing and stealing a lot. This could work against a very weak table but this is too dependent on drawing a good table and would not be a consistent tournament winning strategy. Instead, the small ball strategy does make mathematical sense because deep stacks necessarily offer the right implied pot odds to play a wider range of hole cards than typical.

Most professional poker players will employ the small ball strategy in NL Holdem poker tournaments. The genius of the small ball strategy was brought to the wider public by the great gran daddy of poker Doyle Brunson, in his books Super Systems I and II. Other famous small ballers include Daniel Negreau and Phil Hellmuth.

♦ The Small Ball philosophy - Stack Protection

The small ball mental approach to poker tournaments is to be stealing a lot of pots and also making the big hands like straights, flushes and even trips and two pairs. This approach is totally different from your average tight aggressive player who waits for super-premium hands like AA or KK and hoping they hold up (and everyone who's played a lot of poker knows AA does not always hold up). Instead the small baller waits for very strong hand beyond a pair beyond before putting serious percentages of his stack on the line. This is why you'll never see a pro going out of a tournament - especially in the early blind stages - with a pocket pair or top pair. It is only the weak players who think that a big pair is worth his stack. Yet, making hands like straights and flushes is rare and this why you need to be a deep stack situation to be able to get the correct implied odds.

In a way, even though this is a more aggressive style of poker because it involves a lot of raising and betting. It is also quite a defensive approach to poker, in that by only stacking with very strong poker hands you protect your stack. You will only be committing your chips when you have a huge advantage over the other player.

♦ Small Ball - Suited Connectors

So everyone wants flushes and straights but what makes the small baller more likely to get them? Typically, the small baller is not randomly playing more hands. Just playing a lot of random hands would just be another negative EV approach, even for the most aggressive players. Small ball strategy involves a lot of suited connectors and small pairs, with the aim of making big draws or trips on the flop and if it goes beyond that, to make flushes and straights by the river. Suited connectors and medium small pairs are cards that your typical tight aggressive player will not play in the face of a lot of heat, dread the though of actually raising or bluffing with such cards. But for the small baller, these cards become your bread and butter. They are tricky to play but they have a lot of potential, in that suited connectors often offer enough outs to justify a lot of semi-bluffing on the flop and they do make the big hands which break the big pairs.

To illustrate, if super tight amateur raises in front of you and your read tells you that the oversized raise indicates only AA, would you rather be holding KK or 67h? Holding KK, you only have a 17% chance of winning. Holding 67h, you actually improve to a 23% chance of winning. The most important advantage though is that you will only commit a few chips pre-flop and if the flop doesn't help, you can get away from the hand very easily. If it does help, then when the big chips go in on the turn and river, it is the aces at a big disadvantage. On the other hand, holding KK on a Jh4c8d flop is a very tricky situation. It is suited connectors that break AA and KK.

♦ Lots of raising - Win all the small pots

Aside from the excitement of the big betting with big hands, most of the time the poker is more of a grind. Most of the time your opponents will not be holding AA or KK. Most of the time you will not have trips, flushes or straights. Yet the most important thing is that, most of the time your opponents will be weak. On average your opponents will completely miss the flop to the order of 2:1, depending on their range. Successful small ball strategy depends on being able to win the pots when no-one is very strong.

You do this by exploiting position and making a lot of small bets and re-raises. The size should depend on the player tendencies. You need to play around until you feel out the right bet size that gets people to fold when they have nothing. Even an intermediate player will attack with a re-raise on air when the bet is too small. Typically you will need to push around 50-70% of the pot but it really depends on the table and the players.

♦ Information - Disguise your own betting pattern and pick up on your opponents

The other advantage to the small ball approach is that it relies less on psychic poker and instead it hinges on piecing together a lot information from your opponents betting patterns. By making raises pre-flop a lot and making bets a lot on the flop, you gain information on the range of hands your opponents are playing by whether they fold, call or re-raise. You can then continue the hand accordingly. Small raises pre-flop and on the flop actually forces a lot of information out of your opponents and by the turn you really should have a good idea of what is happening in the hand. By basing your decisions on betting information, you will often be making the correct decision more often. That is, you will be bluffing at the right time more often, pick off bluffs more often, call correctly more often and raise when you know the other man is beat.

In contrast, because you are raising the similarly preflop with 67h and AKs and even raising/betting flops whether you miss or hit, it becomes very difficult for opponents to narrow your range of hands. It puts the guess work on your opponents. This also highlights the importance to keeping your bets to a similar size whether you have a strong / weak hand and when you are bluffing and when you are not.

♦ Conclusion

This is really only an introduction to key concepts of the small ball strategy and if it sounds interesting to you, I highly recommend you search out more literature and most importantly more practice (only so much poker can be taught from books).

Good luck!