The Paradox of All-Ins

I've noticed that ALL winning Hold'em players have giant stacks, obviously from shoving or calling all-in (like 8 - 10 times in a game ..both freerollers & med/high -stake players).

With the nuts postflop it's a no-brainer to shove or call a shove.

But other than that, all-ins, even with a very generous 65% equity, 10 attempts will succeed only 0.65^10 = 1.3% of the time so you will bust-out 98.7% of the time!

So how do all these winners escape the 98.7% bust-out rate. Do they have the nuts everytime they're all-in? I find that implausible.

This has me totally baffled. Thanks for any insight.

Learn to understand the pattern of cards that come in particular position on table. Then you also understand the funda of all-ins and poker!!!

You will only bust out if you go vs a bigger stack. If they triple up then there is no immediate danger.

Yeah as LD above says... You'll only bust out against a bigger stack

If you can get a an early stack advantage like you mention then you can start to bully some short stacks and tight players...

Particularly easy targets are the blinds when you are in late position... They lose their seat or you lose half/third/quarter of your chips...

Some of those stacks are just the result of lucky Donk play and you should target those stacks as an easy way to increase your stack cos they are more willing to push less strong hands against your smaller stack cos that's what Donks like to do !

I agree with the rest (although that has backfired on me a lot). Once you've built a huge stack you can bully smaller stacks and pick up a lot more cheap chips, when you do get the people who counter against you, you are playing them with all those small pots you picked up and your not in any immediate danger, plus, when you do have a hand, you will get action. I have been facing the opposite lately. Last week I had the tournament chip leader who had 150k in chips come to my table, there were 14 players left and the top 10 got paid out. I had 38k in chips and the blinds were 1000 and 2000 with 200 ante. The big stack came to the table and started pushing every single hand and there were many times everyone folded. But the few who called got beat even though he was just pushing and calling with any two. My turn came when I got KK and pushed. Of course he called and I looked forward to a nice double up until his Q7o flopped a pair and turned 2 pair to eliminate me. Happens all the time, but I have seen it go the other way too. When I have a stack, I do not push all in everytime, I pick and choose spots but I also am willing to look up the small stacks who are pushing all in in desperate attempts to double up with a really wide range of hands and I (like most) will continue that practice unless I lose a significant chunk of chips.

OP here:
Thanks for the replies ..great explanations. All-ins are a confusing area for newer players (villain stack-size vs. your stack-size, shoving vs. calling shoves, preflop vs. postflop, etc). But It's a lot clearer to me now.

Ya it seems a lot of people are a big fan off going all in to bully smaller stacks. I personally dont like this technique as it leaves you no where to go.. you can buy the blinds quite often with smaller raises and if you do get called then at least you can take a look at the flop and go from there. If you decide you still wanna try and be a bully then just keep the pressure on and often they will fold anyways.

bdc100 said:

I've noticed that ALL winning Hold'em players have giant stacks, obviously from shoving or calling all-in (like 8 - 10 times in a game ..both freerollers & med/high -stake players).

With the nuts postflop it's a no-brainer to shove or call a shove.

But other than that, all-ins, even with a very generous 65% equity, 10 attempts will succeed only 0.65^10 = 1.3% of the time so you will bust-out 98.7% of the time!

So how do all these winners escape the 98.7% bust-out rate. Do they have the nuts everytime they're all-in? I find that implausible.

This has me totally baffled. Thanks for any insight.

Click to expand...

3 things:
1) You only lose the tournament if a bigger stack beats you.
2) You have fold equity. Deep stacked players tend to bully the shorter stacked players into folding so that they can steal the blinds/antes.
3) freerolls have thousands of players. Suppose everyone starts with 1k chips and later on in the tournament one guy has 100k chips. It only really took him 6 winning coin flips to get there (1k to 2k to 4k to 8k to 16k to 32k to 64k plus a bunch of harassment and blind stealing to get 100k), and we'd expect 1 in 100 players to do that successfully.