On the bubble with monster stack

[gtycoon]

A good time to start stealing blind in a large MTT tourny is when you are on the bubble with short stacks on your left. Most of the time they will fold the blinds to you because they are afraid of finishing out of the money. And if they have really good hand and go all in pre, then you don't have to worry too much because you can in most cases call because you are not in danger of losing the tournament.

[young_mack]

You also can't just throw your stack around because there will be short stacks who need to double up to get in the money. You play a few bad all in hands and all of a sudden your stack ain't so big.

[ILovePoker]

You don't want to double up a small stack, but you can try to steal the blinds with some less than monster hands. A short stack will definitely go all in with a great hand and they will eventually get one sooner or later so you can't try and steal every blind when you have a 2 7 off.

[young_mack]

I call small stack all ins with high cards because most short stacked people will go all in with any pocket pair...or so i've noticed. So chances are that that players cards will be 99 or around there.

[ILovePoker]

Yeah they will go in with any pair and sometimes any ace. Sometimes when I'm the largest stack at a table, I'll feel obligated to call a short stack's all in to try and knock them out. Of course I'll only do it with good cards. Sometimes it seems like the software is just knocking out the shortstacks anyways. You will see some people call a shortstack with 56 and the shortstack has AA and the shortstack will lose.

[young_mack]

AA is only around a 60% favorate against any other hand

[ILovePoker]

That's true. Of course you can win with any two cards if the right cards come on the flop, turn and river.

Even in major tournaments where there is someone with a major chip lead, you'll see the pros call the short stack with any two cards because they believe they have live cards that give them a chance to knock out the short stack.

[young_mack]

Yup its always worth the investment to use 1% of your monster stack to knock out somebody in a coinflip.

[ILovePoker]

It depends because you don't want to double up the short stacks either. If you have good cards it's worth it. A short stack's chips aren't as important to a monster stack. So you only want to call a short stack if you believe you have a good shot at winning the pot.