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Strategy Guide for PokerStars Step 3 Tournaments

BB
The good news about the BB: you generally only have one decision to make. The bad news: you’re going to have to make it a lot and under a variety of circumstances. The BB offers more context-dependent spots than any other seat, so we’re again just going to attempt to illustrate the key principles at work rather than highlight every odd exception / scenario.

With 7-12BB stacks, you can generally call shoves from crippled stacks with impunity, as the price you’ll be getting makes calling with any two cards very profitable. As the size of the raise from your opponent increases, your range should tighten. As tempting as it may be to call off an 8BB shove from the SB with 44 or KJ, be aware that your opponent has to be shoving with a very wide range for this call to be profitable. It’s especially important to begin paying attention to player tendencies at this point (and taking notes) as knowing your opponent’s shove range from the SB is arguably the most important piece of information you can have about them.

Sitting on a 4-7BB stack, you generally have to give a lot of respect to raises from stacks that have you covered, adjusting that respect level downwards the later the position the raise comes from (SB raises should be considered another thing all together; we’ll get to those in a minute). Generally if you have this sort of stack on the bubble there’s likely to be at least one other stack that’s as short as you or lower, so you just don’t have a lot of incentive to gamble calling. In most standard situations, assuming reasonably flat stacks, you should be playing very snug (JJ or better) facing a shove from any seat that has you covered except the small blind.

If the raise comes from a crippled stack, you can open up your range tremendously (close to 50% if you think the player is opening very wide, which you’ll typically see happen more from UTG and the button). As your stack gets smaller and / or your opponents get tighter, revise this range downward to about 15% or so when they’re at their tightest and you’re sitting near 4BBs.

With a sub-4BB stack, you should be playing a little tighter than you might think, as your best chance is basically waiting it out as long as you can in the hopes that your opponents will get frisky and cripple each other. You can certainly play aces, pairs and almost all broadway, but you can still be pitching almost 75% of hands here.
Summary: When your opponent has chips or another player is about to bust, tight is right. When the raises are small, call away.

That’s our best shot at an overview for a profitable strategy in the early / bubble stage of Step 3 tournaments on PokerStars. While every satellite is different, you’ll likely find that a lot of the principles we articulated here transfer pretty smoothly to a wide variety of other satellite tournaments, including other Steps tournaments and even live satellites (especially flat payout MTT sattys that pay 3-6 spots on the final table). Keep an eye out for future articles that will cover play at various points in the Steps system.

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