Suited hands do well too, in part because we need them for if the Big Blind gets involved, we need a hand that can make a flush to win three-way. We compared the same spot early in a normal MTT to early in a PKO: Small Blind Reshoving Range Formatģ3.6% 22+ Ax K3s+ K8o+ Q8s+ QTo+ J8s+ JTo+ T8s+ 98sĤ0.4% 22+ Ax K2s+ K5o+ Q5s+ Q8o+ J8s+ J9o+ T8s+ 98sĪs you can see, the range is actually wider, because we expect the Button to call with 100% of the hands they open with, so any hand with a hint of showdown value plays well against a wide bet/call range. Here is an example from our book, which is what a short stack Small Blind should do against the Button open of a bigger stack. A hand like K2o actually gets stronger when you are covered in a PKO because there is really good chance that you will get looked up by a hand like JTo. High card hands go up in value, whereas small pairs and speculative hands like 67s go down in value. If nobody is folding, then instead of trying to ‘bluff’ should be playing for thin value. However, that does not mean you should be playing tighter, you just need to change your ranges. This is half true, you should not expect anybody to fold when you are short and/or you have a big bounty on your head. The gut instinct most players have is that nobody will fold to them, so they should play really tight. Most players instinctually know they can call wider when they can win a bounty, but they don’t adjust well when they are the bounty everyone is going for. Today I wanted to highlight one of many leaks otherwise good players have in PKO tournaments, and that is what to do when you cannot win a bounty. There are so many unknowns in PKOs that Dara O’Kearney and I have just written the first-ever book on them – PKO Poker Strategy. There are a lot of things about PKOs that make them profitable – regs hate them, recreational players love them and not many people study the right way to play them. It essentially makes them half the rake of their Vanilla MTT equivalent, which makes them automatically more profitable than at sites that charge the standard rake. I’ve long been a big fan of the Bounty Hunters at partypoker for lots of reasons, but perhaps most notably because there is no rake on the bounty element.
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