Played my first live MTT recently and kept finding myself very confused preflop with a medium sized (20-40BB) stack. Online I'd mostly RFI here to 2-2.5x but live a min raise would have me get called by 5 other players. Deepstacked I just upped the raise size, and shorter I just jammed, but I'm still not really sure what to do on 20-40BB stacks. I don't want to have to play multi-way pots, but raising to a bigger size off smaller stacks feels wrong. Appreciate any advice
Thank you for posting.
In live MTT we can play a more exploitative strategy. That means we adjust both bet size and range. Based on table dynamics we are focusing on
equity realization first then raw equity or fold equity.
The first adjustment you may want to make is playing 30-40bb strategy not 20-40bb it seems minor but as many hands live do not end preflop our main concern is SPR and that is too wide a range to play the same way. Our skill advantage post flop is increased by the larger SPR post flop. When we want to get those folds when we shove we need bigger bets to get it. Fear of loss not range is a more common definer live of calls and folds. Yet many of those folds happen on the turn not flop so a bet flop small shove turn strat may be effective villain and board dependent. We are often
bluffing and winning vs second pair hands not top pair or big draws.
We want to split our ranges up with different bet sizing for hands that want folds and hands that play well multiway. Our ranges depend on the agg level of the players behind us so on a passive table we 5x open AA KK QQ -on an agg table we min raise it because we then shove when raised by LAGs. We can fold to nits with QQ (exploitative). We seldom use standard sizing as we do not need to balance. It is fine if the good players on the table fold knowing you have AA if the weak players call.
We do not expect folds so we are not 5x JJ-88 or shoving it. We min raise these hands to have greater SPR post flop. Why the difference AA-JJ? We expect our V to be calling all broadway combo cards even for 5x and then stacking off with 1 pair.
So taking the time to split your preflop ranges for live play based on Equity realization not Fold equity maybe a strategy that has rewards.
One last point we can limp more if the table is passive so we want to limp nut makers and then only put money in post flop when we nut up. So all suited AX is playable from all positions if our V play straight forwardly post flop as we can over fold top pair hands to any action that indicates strength.
Hope this helps