Rebuy Tournaments: Tips For Rebuy Period Play

Jace Thomas : July 1st, 2009

The rebuy tournament is an online poker institution. There were certainly rebuy tournaments before online poker, but the format has simply exploded over the last few years as the near-infinite table capacity of online rooms allowed for rebuy tournaments at all buy in levels. Sophisticated players quickly realized that the rebuy period (generally the first hour of the tournament) was essentially a different game than the rest of the tournament.

Even though they’ve now been popular for quite some time, not all players grasp the basic adjustments necessary to thrive in the rebuy period. You don’t need to plow through multiple buy ins to build a stack – in fact, a strategy that focuses primarily on a strong defensive approach can yield excellent chip results with a minimal investment. Here are a few ways in which the rebuy period differs greatly from a freezeout tournament – hopefully they’ll give you a couple of ideas of how you can shake up your rebuy game and start entering the post-rebuy period with a serious stack.

Reads on Your Opponents are Critical in Early Stages
In a freezeout, you can generally get away with paying less attention to your opponents in the early stages of a tournament. You’re unlikely to be at the table for any great length of time and the majority of players tend to play a pretty straightforward game in the first few levels. In a rebuy, however, it’s critical that you pay close attention to your opponents, as the range of possible opponent behavior can be much, much wider. Identifying the very loose and very aggressive players can pay massive dividends in the rebuy period, so shake your habit of costing through the first levels on auto-pilot and take copious notes – there’s likely to be plenty of action for you to pull from.

Limping Marginal Hands Works
Limping weak connectors in a freezeout is a recipe for chip drain, but that’s not the case during the rebuy period. Those 97o type hands you’re accustomed to ditching in MP can usually be limped (unless the table is super-aggro preflop and there’s likely to be a massive raise behind). Why? First, the rebuy period allows you to call small raises more correctly – it’s simply not as much of a risk to your stack to take highly speculative flops if you can reload that stack. Second, players are generally much looser post-flop during the rebuy period, so your chances of taking down a monster pot if you flop strong increase dramatically.

Limping Strong Hands Works
Limping strong hands in a freezeout is usually a recipe for disaster. Even if you get a raise behind, the stacks are usually so deep that you can’t really extract a lot of value without making your hand pretty obvious. In rebuys, however, players are far more likely to make massive shoves on limps with a wide range. Also, even if you don’t get a raise behind, your overpair has a lot more value post-flop as opponents will commit their stacks on much weaker hands during the rebuy period than they would in a freezeout.

Running Big Bluffs is Generally Useless
The math of bluffing generally requires that you be able to get your opponent to fold a pretty decent hand every now and again for the bluff to be profitable. In a rebuy, very few players are folding pretty decent hands regardless of the pressure you put on them. There are exceptions; if both of you have unusually deep stacks or a board is just horrible for their likely range, a big bluff can still work, but the overwhelming majority of the time a bluff is going to backfire. Save your chips for more profitable endeavors.

Shoving for Value Post-Flop Works
This one’s not rocket science, but tons of players overlook it. In the world of the rebuy period, most players simply aren’t folding reasonable hands like top pair, medium-strength draws and so on. In a world like that, there’s no need for you to massage the pot. Jamming and check-jamming your medium-strength hands and your strong hands will, time after time, get you paid off. Rebuys are not subtle tournaments – you can massively overbet your hands successfully if your opponent already has some chips in or is likely to have hit any piece of the board along with you.

Speculative Calls Pre and Post Flop Can Be Effective and Profitable
The rebuy period plays a lot more like a cash game than a tournament in some ways, and as a result you can afford to play a far wider range against raises and bets than you would in a freezeout. Not only can you replenish your stack, negating some of the risk that usually accompanies such looseness in tournament play, but, again, you’re far more likely to get paid when you do hit due to a similar looseness on the part of your opponents.

Rebuy periods are an interesting, unique part of a tournament, and attentive players who heed the differences can gain a serious chip edge over their opponents. Hopefully the above has given you a starting point for rethinking your own approach and watching your stacks grow while your rebuy costs decrease.

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