Of all the factors that dictate what you can and can't do during a poker tournament, it's the size of your chip stack — and the stack sizes of others — that reign supreme. In a no-limit hold'em multi-table tournament, you can go from hero to zero with the turn of a card, so understanding stack sizes and how they affect the dynamics of a poker hand is a crucial aspect of poker learning.
In this article we're going to focus primarily on preflop play in multi-table tournaments where we can break down our awareness of stacks into three broad areas:
- the stack sizes of those acting before you
- your own stack size
- the stack sizes of those still to act
We'll take each of these one at a time, but first one caveat.