Ben Rolle Is Convinced: Your Big Stack Game Sucks
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Some leaks in poker are, if not universal, then very common. And the problem of playing with a big stack is one of them — at least, that’s what CoinPoker ambassador and renowned coach Ben Rolle believes:
Playing a BIGSTACK is where most of you f*ck up. You don’t understand the EXTREME levels of adjustments you have to make to TRULY CRUSH as a Bigstack in Tournament Poker. From opening J2o or 3betting K3o to folding AQ vs a 3bet. Most of you are still stuck in GTO wonderland, which costs you a ton of money, trying to be “balanced”. And then you complain you don’t have any big scores. Yeah, because your big stack game sucks.
Using one spot as an example, he explained on X (Twitter) how to play with a large stack — and we’re sharing his thread with you in this article.
This is the spot Rolle chose as an example:
In this case, AKs is not a hand to give up. Ben wouldn’t fold AKo but for that hand the decision may not be so obvious. Rolle advises checking your opponent’s range first:
According to Ben, it doesn’t seem so unrealistic for a tight opponent:
Yeah, it’s not GTO. When a ton of money is at stake, you don’t want to play GTO, you want to do what is best against your specific opponent. And most of you are not prepared for scared-money nits, which you will usually have 2-3 of them on big final tables. And as we can see, despite 3betting the suited Aces quite frequently and some suited broadways, AKo is not thrilled here.
In theory, this is what SB and HJ are supposed to play:
This example doesn’t mandate folding AKo or TT — Ben himself would always call with them, too — but it does give you the opportunity to shift your playstyle from GTO-oriented to human-oriented and also helps to play more thoughtfully:
We’ve all been in situations where our gut told us to fold or play a bit more cautiously. But then, our inner voice told us, “We can’t fold this, it’s way too strong”. Yeah, it’s strong in GTO vs a robot, but you are facing a tight-money, scared player. Being able to switch gears extremely as a big stack is a crazy, underrated superpower. It also goes the other way: someone is attacking your chiplead too loosely, and you can 4bet every single hand or just jam your J9S super profitably. Most of you only know how to play loose (probably even not understanding when to push it even further), but that’s a poor game plan for a big stack, since 1 misstep can cost you your valuable situation.
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