Common mistakes I make in the late stages of no limit multis

Chris Grove : November 4th, 2007

I am primarily a ring game player; there are, of course, spots in my playing career where I’ve tinkered with multis, but it usually ends up being a passing phase. For whatever reason, I decided to give multis a serious shot about a month ago and have really focused on learning about tournament play. For those of you in a similar situation, or those of you just starting out in tournament play, here’s a list of the mistakes I see myself making consistently in the late stages of multis – and by late stage, I’m referring to the period where about 15%-5% of players remain, so roughly a few rounds before the bubble, the bubble, and a few rounds following the bubble.

1) Not being aggressive enough near the bubble. I simply miss too many chances to steal bets and blinds preflop by retreating into the “playing to not lose mentality.” Fact is, if I have any kind of stack at all and there are a few players on my table who are just hanging on, I should probably be stealing at least twice a round, regardless of my cards.

2) Raising more than I need to. Greg wrote two good articles about this – “raising guide for NL multis” and “how much should you raise?” – and I need to follow their advice more closely. By raising more, I don’t mean raising more time times or more often, but that the actual amounts of my raises are too large – all too often I’m betting 3500 preflop when 2800 would do the same job.

3) Playing my cards and not the situation. Last night I was down to 30 players in the Party Super tuesday tournament. I had an average stack with about 25k. UTG, who was chip leader, raises the minimum at 6k [blinds are at 1500 and 3000], UTG has been minimum raising a lot, probably opened the pot with such a raise 5 out of last ten hands. I push allin on the button with AJ and UTG turns up QQ. Now I don’t think the AJ play was horrible – there was over 10k for me to pick up if UTG folds, and I don’t have to respect his raise, but the fact is, I didn’t need to make that play. There are situations in a tournament where you need to gamble, and that just wasn’t one of them. I saw a good hand [relatively] and focused on that – not the fact that I had enough chips to play strong for at least 2 if not 3 more rounds.

4) Handling a minimum raise in the BB. This gets me into trouble on a regular basis – say I’m holding 9 10 in the BB and someone minimum raises. Usually I’m in a position where I can afford to call, but unless I really slam a flop with this hand, I’m gonna be in an awkward spot. Should I steal on a flop that looks safe? Doesn’t the check – fold just look incredibly weak? I like the idea of re raising preflop for a resteal, but minimum raises still run up red flags in my head. I don’t like folding because it sets such a bad precedent. Bottom line – I don’t handle the minimum raise well when I’m on my blinds.

I won’t pretend that these are the only problems I have in late stages, but they seem to be the ones that get me in the most trouble. Hopefully you’ll see some follow up articles about how I corrected these problems soon . Until then, I invite you to post in our forum to offer me some advice or share your own list of late stage difficulties.