MTT Strategy Guide: Every Stage of a Tournament

A multi-table tournament is five different games played with the same chips. What wins pots at 120 big blinds — set mining, floats, thin value bets — is unplayable at 15, and a call that is routine in a cash game can be a disaster on the bubble. Your effective stack and the prize ladder decide which game you are currently in. This guide walks each stage in order: what changes, why it changes, and the single adjustment that matters most.

The five stages at a glance

Stage boundaries are set by the effective stack in big blinds, not by the clock or the number of players left. A 40bb stack on day two plays exactly like a 40bb stack in level three.

Stage	Effective stack	What decides most pots
Early	80-150bb	Postflop skill and implied odds
Middle	40-70bb	Antes, position, steal frequency
Bubble	20-40bb	ICM pressure and fold equity
Post-bubble	12-25bb	Shove and re-shove ranges
Final table	10-40bb	Pay jumps and the stacks around you

Two forces push you down that table. Blinds and antes climb, so your stack shrinks in big blinds even during levels where you win chips. And prize money starts to bite, first as a bubble and then as a ladder of pay jumps. The first force changes which hands are playable. The second changes what a chip is worth.

Stage one: 100 big blinds and real poker

Early levels are the only part of a tournament where a chip is worth roughly what it costs. There is no bubble in sight, the pay jumps are hours away, and doubling your stack roughly doubles your equity in the prize pool. Play it as what it is: a deep-stacked cash game with a shrinking stack.

Open ranges belong at their widest in position and their tightest up front — around 15-17% of hands from UTG in a six-max field, and 40-45% from the BTN. A full nine-handed table squeezes the early seats tighter still.

Depth rewards hands that flop well and win big pots. Pocket pairs get to set mine at a proper price, suited aces and suited broadways make nutted hands that get paid, and position lets you realise every bit of that equity. Depth punishes dominated offsuit hands, because A9o that flops top pair at 120bb has found a way to lose 40bb, not win it.

The other early-stage discipline is refusing marginal all-ins. Flipping for 100bb in level two is a fine chip-EV decision and a poor tournament one, because you cannot use the chips you win as well as you can use the tournament you already survived. The case for patience and position at this depth is unpacked in early stage tournament play.

Stage two: antes arrive and the pots get bigger

The ante is the biggest single strategy change in a tournament, and most players barely react to it. It drops dead money into every pot before anyone has acted.

In a nine-handed game with a big blind ante, the pot contains about 2.5bb before the first raise. Open 2.2bb from the CO and you are risking 2.2 to win 2.5 — the steal only needs to work a little over half the time to break even, before you count the pots you win after being called.

That price is why late-position opens widen once antes start, and why limping and over-folding become the two most expensive habits of the middle stages. Every orbit you fold through costs you 2.5bb of dead money that somebody else collects. Over a four-hour session that is not a rounding error, it is your stack.

The blinds get the same memo. Your big blind is already invested and the ante has sweetened the pot, so you are getting a price to defend that would look reckless without antes in play. Folding the BB to a small late-position raise should become rare rather than routine.

Stacks of 40-70bb also change your postflop shape. Stack-to-pot ratios in three-bet pots get small, so top pair becomes a stack-off hand far more often than it was at 120bb, and speculative hands lose the implied odds that justified them. Three-bet more, cold-call less, and stop peeling flops with hands that need two perfect streets to get there.

Stage three: the bubble rewrites the maths

Everything above assumes chips and money track each other. From here they do not.

The chips you win are worth less than the chips you risk. Every strange-looking fold near the money follows from that one line.

Doubling from 20bb to 40bb does not double your share of the prize pool, because the prize pool is capped and shared. But busting takes you to zero. That asymmetry is the whole of ICM, and it is explained at length in why tournament chips lose value.

The practical consequence at the money bubble is that your correct strategy depends less on your cards than on who covers you. If a big stack can bust you, you need a genuinely strong hand to play for stacks, and hands that would be automatic calls in chip-EV terms — small pairs, weak aces, suited connectors — become folds.

If you are the big stack, the same maths runs in your favour. You are risking chips that cost you very little and attacking players who cannot call. Open every button, three-bet the medium stacks, and apply pressure until somebody proves they will play back.

The players who lose most on the bubble are the medium stacks who keep playing their normal game. They are covered, they are not desperate, and they call off 30bb with a hand that was profitable last level and is not profitable now.

Stage four: the shove zone at 12-25 big blinds

Post-bubble, the field loosens and stacks are shallow. Your preflop toolkit narrows to two moves.

Below about 12bb, open-shoving is the strategy. Raise-folding is dead — a 2bb open leaves you no fold equity later in the hand and no room to fold — so you go all-in or you pass. The correct ranges by stack and position are solved and worth committing to memory, and they are laid out in push or fold shoving ranges.

Between 12 and 25bb, the three-bet shove is your main weapon. Late-position opens are wide at this stage, and shoving 18bb over a 2.2bb CO open collects roughly 5bb of dead money when it works. Risking 18 to win 5 needs to succeed often, which means two things: pick opponents who open wide and fold to pressure, and pick hands that still have equity when they call. A hand like A5s does both jobs. K9o only does one.

The trap in this stage is the middle: 15bb is too short to call an open and see a flop, and too deep to feel comfortable shoving. Calling is almost always the worst of the three options. Shove or fold, and let the size of your fold equity decide which.

Stage five: the final table and the pay ladder

Pay jumps are steepest at the end, so ICM pressure peaks exactly when stacks are shallowest and every decision is for a meaningful slice of the prize pool.

Two identical stacks can have opposite correct strategies here. If there is a 6bb stack at the table about to be blinded out, everybody with chips should tighten and let the ladder move. Once that stack busts, the same spots reopen immediately.

Position on the pay ladder also changes what a coinflip is worth. Flipping for the chip lead with three players left, when second and third are separated by a large jump, can lose you money even when you win the flip half the time. Late-stage poker rewards accumulating without confrontation more than any other format.

Before your next session, run a realistic set of payouts and stacks through an ICM calculator so the shape of those numbers is familiar. The difference between a call and a fold at the final table is often a few per cent of prize pool equity, which is not a number you can estimate at the table without having seen it before.

The one adjustment per stage

• Early: play deep-stacked poker and decline flips. Position and implied odds decide the pots.
• Middle: widen your late-position steals the moment antes start, and stop cold-calling.
• Bubble: work out who covers whom. Attack if you are big, tighten hard if you are covered.
• Post-bubble: shove or fold. Calling raises at 15bb is the leak that quietly ends tournaments.
• Final table: price every decision in prize money, and let short stacks bust before you take risks.

None of this requires memorising a hundred charts. It requires knowing which of the five games you are playing right now, and being willing to abandon the strategy that worked two levels ago the moment your stack tells you to.