Block Theory – A Quick Primer

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Block theory was coined by Darrel “Gigabet” Dicken as a way of looking at stack sizes and the potential problems that may arise by being grouped in with a certain level of chips in a tournament. By escaping the block of chips that your peers are in and moving up to a higher block, or your own personal block, it can cause you to find more advantageous spots later in the tournament.

In effect, it gives you an excuse to take negative equity gambles in the present in order to set up positive equity situations in the future based on the big stack you’ve accrued. Let’s go over a few scenarios that put block theory in action.

We’ll put ourselves in a PokerStars MTT, a 6 max, with stacks as follows.

Blinds 100/200

Seat 1- 6,000
Seat 2- 7,500
Seat 3- 2,000
You- 8,000
Seat 5- 4,000
Seat 6- 3,000

You have the chip lead at your table, but not by a margin to be comfortable with. Block theory tells us that we want to put a block of chips between us and the nearest group of players, in order to bring about more profitable scenarios in future levels.

So, who are we grouped with? The first two seats have M20+, so we’re in with them. They’re to our right, though, which is desirable for us.

Who are we looking to get chips from, then? The seat directly to our right is M6.6, and looking to chip up soon. If we eliminate him, we may have the two stacks that compare to us in chips directly to our right for a short time, depending on how deep the tourney is. And, moving up to 10,000 chips distances us significantly from the 6k stack, and gives us a bit of a cushion on the 7.5k stack.

With a stack big enough to absorb a blow from either or those stacks, it forces them to tighten up a bit against us until they can chip back up to our level. Given this information, it becomes clear that the short stack is the stack we need to be willing to eliminate to block up in chips.

The question, then, is how loose are we willing to get when we play against the short stack? We need to look at the hit we take if we play against the short stack and lose; it drops us to 6k, which is still M20 and keeps us very much in the block we were in to begin with. So, we can afford to be a bit more loose than normal when calling a 10 BB shove. Assuming that normally, my calling range against a typical player’s shove at 10 BB’s is any pair, Ax, K5+, Q8+, J10, I may add the rest of the kings, Q5+, and J8+ to that range if the block of chips I gain from knocking out the short stack makes me difficult to play against.

It isn’t a huge amount of extra hands (9 more) but they all are going to generally be behind the range of Seat 3’s shoving range. I’m willing to take the gamble to block up, though, and if it doesn’t work, he doesn’t jump above me in chips, and I stay in the block with the rest of the bigger stacks. It’s a slightly negative gamble with huge returns if it works; which is a big asset to have when trying to run deep in large field MTT’s.

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