Keith Brandt 1:1 Coaching - 1 hour 
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Bullies On My Immediate Left
We’ve made the decision to invest the time and money to play in an MTT. Shortly after play starts a couple of players are seated to our immediate left and start playing in a very loose, splashy manner. They keep hitting lucky rivers and soon come to dominate the table with their big stacks. Folding has all but disappeared from both of their games – except when they are heads up against each other. It has become apparent that these two collectively will not let us win a pot without putting our whole stack in the middle. The blinds and antes are chipping away at our already meager stack.
How should we navigate this situation to put ourselves in a position to win this tournament? I’d like to get some of your thoughts on this.
It seems to me there are two equally important dimensions to this:
– Mental game
– Strategy adjustments
Mental Game
We have two kinds of tilt that we must overcome here: Entitlement tilt and bully tilt.
Entitlement tilt
Lady Luck is a fickle witch. She sometimes gets in the mood to shower her favors upon bad players for making their bad plays. It’s the nature of the beast in poker (and blackjack tournaments). We have invested a great deal of money, time, and effort in developing our game. And now, we’re not being rewarded for it. We feel outraged. Cheated.
We must have the self-awareness to recognize when this is happening to us. We must remember that we chose to play a game in which luck is a factor in our outcomes. If we want to be consistently rewarded for our skills, we should play chess. We should also remember another thing about fickle Lady Luck – we need her favors to win a tournament, but she doesn’t like it when we knock on her door too often. That goes for our splashy bullies too.
Bully tilt
We all learn in childhood that we must stand up to bullies. This childhood process ingrains in us the instinct to become angry and lash out at them. Unfortunately, in poker this is tilt. It plays right into the bully’s hands.
We must have the self-awareness to recognize when this is happening to us. Then we use whatever techniques we have learned calm down and reclaim rational control of our reactions at the table. Then we can apply the best strategy adjustments to this unfortunate situation.
Strategy Adjustments
Sometimes the bullies won’t let us win a pot without putting all our chips in the middle. They’ll even call your shoves for 20 or even 30bb. It’s even harder when two bullies are cooperating with each other. How do we adjust our play to account for this when these bullies are to our immediate left?
You’re trying to win the tournament. A double-up would help a lot. Maybe we should just shove preflop for up to 30bb with a top-down range that gives us a range advantage over what the bullies are likely to call with. We may not have much fold equity, but at least we neutralize our positional disadvantage. We should use very tight ranges for early position, because the other players acting after the bullies can wake up with a hand. Maybe QQ+, AK would work. But if we are in late position we could open it up. Our range should be loaded with aces and pairs, because the bullies have many unpaired hands without aces in their ranges. It is unlikely they will both call off our shove, not wanting to feed too many chips to each other. In a heads-up shove, our lower pairs fare much better than in a multiway shove with 2 players holding different overcards. Maybe 22+, A2+ would work. Maybe we should add all broadways except JT to this range. We’ll need to knock on Lady Luck’s door.
What ranges and strategies do you think are best here?
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2 Replies
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In general, when playing vs maniacs/bullies it is important to determine if they are “calling like maniacs” or “raising like maniacs”. When they are calling too much you can raise big/push into them, but if they prefer to be the aggressive part you need to induce with a small bet and then call wider than normal. In both cases you need to embrace variance as you will be eliminated often.
In order to explore the pushing strategy further I created a CardrunnersEV scenario where the hero pushes 30bb into two players/maniacs. Both villains use the same calling ranges, but when the first villain calls the second only overcalls with one quarter of the calling range (i.e. 40% calling range leads to 10% overcalling range).
I then created a chart that shows which hands that will profit more than roughly one big blind vs different villain calling ranges. Notice that when both villains calls with 75% of hands you still need to fold 67% of the time.
I have not considered any “normal” players behind the maniacs. That will shrink the number of profitable hands further.
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If your stack is already meager, a study of Nash ranges is in order. Knowing what is a profitable shove is the first thing to know. If you have no fold equity, then you might want to tighten up 10% or so.
I would also trap. Pay attention to what makes them go nuts. Aggrotards love the smell of weakness. A lot of the time all it takes is checking the flop and you can check/shove or 3 bet the nuts on the Turn.
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