Ante-up tourneys

[lucky_scrote]

I've not read any strategy on ante-up tourneys nor have I played many.

Do you just add up the antes and chop them up into blinds and work from there? Is that a poor strategy or a good place to start?

How about balancing limping with strong hands? I assume that is pretty standard as you are meant to limp every hand.

[cambridgealex]

That's how I started. If the antes are 500 then there's 4500 in there, so roughly 1200/2400/200 sort of thing...

[Doobs]

Just limp everything while you can and outplay the tourney donks post flop.  Late on people fold when they should always call. So many people fold pre when they should never ever do this.  Love ante up tourneys.
  Problem is it is hard to play them when you have a bunch of tourneys going.  So tilting folding 27 off when you only have to pay 5 in to a 3000 pot.

[wazz]

That's how I started. If the antes are 500 then there's 4500 in there, so roughly 1200/2400/200 sort of thing...

Maybe I'm missing something obvious but how does this information affect our strategy?

Oh, and hey Dan!

[Bertpup]

Do you just add up the antes and chop them up into blinds and work from there? Is that a poor strategy or a good place to start?

You can get away with opening a lot smaller relative to the pot. It's in your interest to keep blind steals as small as possible so don't go around and over complicate things. The majority of players who play these are generally playing for fun and are not high level thinkers. Keep it simple and just try and win as many as possible for as cheap as possible.

[wazz]

Oh, obvious, you want to use it as a marker for how much you should be raising?

I think it would be related to that but we also want to take advantage of the flexibility afforded to us by the change in ratio of blinds to antes. I.E. with 1/8th we're sorta handcuffed and a minraise otb gives the bb 4-1 on a call, and that's the best odds we can offer, but with bigger antes we can choose to give him even better odds to call.

With the caveat of only ever having played 1 or 2 of these things in my life, I'd imagine that relating the size of the pot preflop to blinds probably gives us a good idea of when our only option preflop becomes to shove, but beyond that, we want to give ourselves the flexibility to play multiple streets and keep the pot small while still attacking. We're rarely going to be afforded the opportunity to blind steal but the button still gives us the greatest opportunity to win pots, but because we're going to be attacking with a fairly wide range (obviously people will limp monsters in this game much more than they do in a normal-structured MTT, but we attack anyway) we keep our raise size down and rely not on getting people to fold preflop but to have them call and either miss the flop or make the second-best hand. With that in mind, I don't want to be sizing my raise according to any formula like 'number of limpers + 1', but feel like we're best off treating each situation as it comes.

Preflop balance becomes interesting. Because we're attacking a wide range we probably only want to overlimp monsters on the button when there are shortstacks in the bilnds but even then I feel people overestimate how shove-happy shortstacks are and end up missing value. In any case, from other positions, we still want to be raising sometimes with good semibluffing hands, as we're sometimes wanting to raise for value, but because we can expect a raise behind us more often than in a normal tournament (or is this not the case?) we also want to limp tons of good hands ourselves.