Range adjustment based off of effective stack size

[ericklam92]

NLHE tournament strategy theory discussion:

I believe that in order to survive tournaments it is important to adjust your ranges based off of your effective stack size. I am just wondering if others think the same way.

My thought is... The more chips we have, the more time we have to wait for big hands to play. If we are too loose on our hand selection, we could bleed our stack away and not receive the benefit of a big starting hand. However, when we have mid/small stack sizes, we simply don't have quite as much time to wait and we are hurting our chances by being too tight.

So for example. Let's say we are sitting on the button and the CO makes a standard opening raise. The attached image is how I see possible playable ranges, based on the effective big blinds.

Do you agree with this, or would we be burning $ if we are playing this tight at 30bb+?

Do you agree with the principal of adjusting ranges and standard mode of operations, based on your effective stack? Or should we just be focusing on the belief that the same ranges are optimal no matter what the effective stacks are?

 

[Nafor]

In general the size of your stack should definitely have an effect to your playing style.

Small stack forces us to take more risks but then we might already be in the shove or fold part of our game. A big stack gives some breething room but becoming too comfortable and cautious is not good either. A big stack doesn't force you to take risks but it gives you opportunities to take them, and a tournament can't won without taking risks. As always, there are so many things to concider...

 

[Leandro6803]

I agree with you, leaving the range flexible according to your stack is a good strategy, especially in long tournaments, having a sense of range, stack and how aggressive the table is is essential for a good player to do well in the tournament.

 

[spunka]

You always have to adjust opening ranges to blinds, position, opponent, buyins, action etc…