Being Aware of the Blind Structure in Online Tournaments

One of the most important aspects of successfully playing in any multi-table tournament is staying ahead of the blinds and antes. The number of strategic options available to you will always be largely dependent on the number of big blinds in your stack at any point. Therefore, it is essential that you be aware of the tournament structure before you begin, so that you can plan out how aggressively you will need to attack right from the beginning. For example, the typical blind structure on PokerStars begins at 10-20, 15-30, 25-50, but then jumps right to 50-100, 75-150, 100-200, with antes beginning on the seventh round. This is a much faster structure than Full Tilt Poker, which usually starts off at 15-30, but then goes to 20-40, 25-50, 30-60, 40-80, 50-100, 60-120, 80-160, 100-200 before adding in antes, which also then come at a slower pace.

If you are playing a tournament on each site with 10-minute levels, these two structures require somewhat different styles of play. If you assume a starting stack of 3,000 chips, and subscribe to Harrington’s theory of wanting to have at least 20 rounds of blinds and antes in your stack in order to have a full range of plays available to you, you would have an hour of play in the Poker Stars structure with that flexibility if you just stayed in place, whereas the Full Tilt structure would give you 90 minutes (or 50% more time!) before you would need to add chips to keep up with the blinds and antes to maintain a complete arsenal of plays. Fifty percent more time is a relative eternity online, and gives you the latitude to pick your spots a little more carefully in the early going.

It is important to recognize that, unless you are playing in a very deep-stacked tournament, once the antes kick in, you are going to need to have amassed a lot of chips in order to be in a strong enough position to have many betting options available to you. For example, even if you have increased your stack to 4,500 (a 50% increase) before antes are added, if the first level of antes is at 150-300-25, you will have less than 7 rounds of blinds and antes in your stack, and you will be close to pot committed any time you choose to play a hand. As a result, it is important to try and push harder with smaller edges early in play to see if you can get some early double-ups, putting yourself among the bigger stacks right from the beginning. This serves two purposes: 1) You get more of a safety net in relation to the growing blinds, and 2) You can use the big stack to collect more chips by pushing around the more timid players who are afraid that you are going to knock them right out of the tournament.

While no online tournament is won at the beginning, you will find that, more frequently than not, the players who get off strongly in the early stages can often be found among the leaders all the way through. By having more playing options available to them, these players have more leeway in deciding when to put their chips at risk, and can control their tables more effectively. Stay ahead of the blinds, and watch your tournament success explode!