Changing Your Behaviour When Re-Stealing

After reading Marcus Bateman's excellent piece about when you should be re-stealing, I thought I'd look at the situations where you should be looking to change your own behavior depending on the stack sizes around you.

Some tournament players are just not capable of thinking about making re-steals with marginal hands. These players if they do make these sorts of shoves on you will nearly always have a very strong hand.

Conversely, there are players who seem to make these sort of plays with reckless abandonment - happily re-shoving into even very tight players who are only opening a hand every two or three orbits.

Finally you have players who make these sort of plays in a balanced and considered manner, happily re-raising quite light against loose openers, yet forgetting these plays against the rocks of the table.

Working out which group of players is to your left is critical late on in tournaments when considering what hands you should be opening. If you seem to have a lot of players on your left who are happy to re-raise incredibly light, you should drastically tighten your opening range.

Conversely, if the players to your left just seem to be waiting for hands, you can start opening basically any playable hand, as you know that mostly they will be folding, and if they do make a play you will know exactly where you are.

This effect can be so pronounced that an astute player will actually play two polar opposite styles in these two different situations. It is areas like this where very good players show why they are better than much of the opposition.

Through careful observation of the players that they need to focus on at these stages, good players can drastically change how they play to adjust to the conditions around them.

Keep a close eye on what your opponents are capable of, open your hands accordingly and let their unbalanced play pay you off.

**A quick heads-up to any Canadian-based players...checkout the Betfair WSOPE Freerolls in the tournament lobby. These games are not filling up meaning most players get a walk to the weekly final;)**

-- Sorel Mizzi

Check out Sorel's home site, Betfair Poker, via PokerListings link and sign up to take advantage of our exclusive up to $1,500 bonus at 100% match.

More blogs from Betfair Poker pro Sorel Mizzi:

• Attacking the Big Stack
• Position in Heads-Up SNG's
• A Quick Review of 2008
• Collusion and Soft-Playing in Italy