Strategy: Pivot Points IV Conclusion... plus "Stages of the Game" tease

So for a couple of posts now I have been writing about the idea of pivot points and how you can use them to improve your game. It is a tough balance between having too many and too few pivot points because if you have too many they are hard to remember and too few then you will be lost in many situations.

Last weekend while I as giving a lesson, a student of mine commented on some particular plays that I made differently than him. I was 9 tabling and he mentioned that I missed a SB shove that was on the chart. It was the very bottom of the range but since we were on the bubble I felt like it was justified as we were covered by the BB. We were about 8BB deep. We resolved to look at the situation later in wizard.

What we found was startling. It seems that because we were covered and we were on the bubble wizard was only recommending shoving about 35% of our hands. However when we tweaked the stack sizes slightly so that we covered BB wizard recommended ATC. This is clearly something important to look at. I told him, take a look at your hands for the week where you shove the SB and lets see if we can get a new pivot point together.

Possible New Pivot: ~8-10BB on bubble, shove normal range from SB if you cover the BB but only shove 35% if they cover you.

This is not a battle tested pivot point and I still need to spend some time playing with wizard to see if it really stands the test of time and math. It may be that there is a more complex bubble factor dynamic that needs to be flushed out and that this pivot will not work with a high enough percentage of the time to be useful. It may also be that some other factor that we were not aware of is actually dominating the result. Either way it needs more investigation since it could be a very useful as this type of adjustment would come up a lot in bubble situations.

So to conclude, I am interested in hearing from people if they have other pivots that they use which they rely on regularly. It may be a 10BB Btn shoving range or a typical calling range. If you've got a good pivot drop me a message on the blog. I would be happy to discuss it. A good player builds this kind of knowledge base over time. By developing a good arsenal of pivots we will make more correct decisions more often than our opponents and we will profit.

The next strategy series is going to be entitled: Stages of the Game and we are going to be talking about the early, mid, and late stages of the SNG. We will break it down by effective stack size and talk about the typical things we are thinking and doing at each stage to maximize our profit. So stay tuned!

Greg