WPT GTO Trainer Hands of the Week: Defending Your Button on Shallow Stacks
In today’s spot you’ll be playing on shallow 20 big blind stacks on the Button in a multi-table tournament. This scenario and stack depth will be extremely common for tournament players. The first thing to note is that your range isn’t very wide in this spot since you’d often reshove preflop with many hands such as 77-QQ, AQ+, KQs, and more. Given that your range is somewhat narrow, you’ll have enough equity on many boards to take stabs at the pot in position when your opponent checks on the flop.
Don’t be afraid to follow up with turn aggression when you have some backup equity in the hand such as holding overcards to the board. Turn aggression is especially effective on cards that are likely to have hit your range more often than your opponent’s range.
Since you are in position, you often get to set the price of showdown. When your opponent checks to you on the river, you should often be happy to showdown marginal made hands that are not likely to get value from worse hands if you bet.
When deciding whether or not to bluff the river, be sure to see whether your hand blocks or unblocks the types of hands you want your opponent to fold. For example, if you have a flush draw or a straight draw that missed, they are less likely to hold the same draw. If you do block some hands that they would fold, you might not want to bluff in that situation.
To see more examples and test your skills, you can play through five free solved hands from this scenario.
To access the free five hands, visit this page.
Regular play on the WPT GTO Trainer will help you adjust your decisions closer and closer to GTO strategy.
You don’t have to be the world’s best player to use GTO Strategy, and thanks to the WPT GTO Trainer, now you don’t have to buy expensive software or have expert level knowledge to study GTO.
Why use the WPT GTO Trainer?
The WPT GTO Trainer lets you play real solved hands against a perfect opponent in a wide variety of postflop scenarios for cash game and tournament play.
If your goal is to be a tough poker player then you should try the WPT GTO Trainer today.
Register a free account here (it only takes your e-mail address to begin) to play hands and see true GTO strategy in real-time.
The WPT GTO Trainer has over 4 billion unique solved flops, turns and rivers that are fully playable.
As you make decisions in a hand, you receive instant feedback on the specific EV loss (if any) and Played Percentage for every action you take as compared to GTO strategy.
The full selection of scenarios for the WPT GTO Trainer are only available to members of LearnWPT, however we’re giving PokerNews Readers free access to the Trainer on a regular basis with the WPT GTO Hands of The Week.
Use this series of articles to practice the strategies you learn on LearnWPT (or at the table) and test your progress by playing a five-hand sample each week.
