MTT Preflop Charts by Stack Depth

Why tournament preflop is not cash preflop

A 6-max cash chart makes three assumptions: everyone has 100 big blinds, there is no ante, and a chip is worth exactly a chip. A multi-table tournament breaks all three, usually before the second break. Blinds climb on a clock, an ante appears a few levels in, and from the bubble onwards a chip you lose costs you more than a chip you win.

The six seat-by-seat charts on the main preflop charts page are still the right place to start, because position remains the largest single factor at every stack depth. What a tournament adds is everything layered on top of it.

Antes widen everything

An ante is dead money, and dead money changes the price of every steal. With no ante, the 6-max pot before anyone acts is 1.5 big blinds. Add a 1bb big blind ante and it is 2.5.

Run the arithmetic on a 2.2x open. Without the ante you risk 2.2 to win 1.5, so if you simply gave up whenever called, the raise would need to win the pot outright 59% of the time. With the ante you risk 2.2 to win 2.5 and the break-even falls to 47%. That is the whole reason late-position opens in a tournament are wider than the cash chart, and the same maths gives the big blind a better price to defend, so its calling range widens too. More fold equity for the raiser and a cheaper call for the defender pull in opposite directions; both ranges end up wider than they were.

Shallower stacks flatten the tree

At 100bb an open can be 3-bet, 4-bet and 5-bet before anyone is all in. At 25bb that tree has nowhere to go: an open to 2.2bb and a 3-bet to 6bb already commit a quarter of the stack, and a 4-bet is a shove wearing a disguise.

So the small, frequent 3-bet gives way to flatting and jamming. At 40bb a 3-bet pot leaves roughly 33bb behind in a pot of about 14.5 — a stack-to-pot ratio near 2, where top pair is already committed and 4-bet bluffing has no fold equity to buy. At 25bb the choice from the blinds is usually call or jam, with very little in between.

Hand values move with the tree. Suited connectors and small pairs need depth to pay off, because their value is in the pots they win after the flop. Offsuit broadways and ace-x gain, because they win pots at showdown and because their blockers matter more when someone is shoving.

Fifteen big blinds and under

Below about 15 big blinds, raise-folding stops making sense. Open to 2bb from a 15bb stack and you have risked 13% of everything you have on a hand you intend to fold to a shove, while leaving yourself 13bb — an amount any opponent is delighted to jam over. Open-shoving removes the problem: maximum fold equity, no postflop decisions, no chance of being blown off the hand.

At 10bb and under, push/fold is the correct game rather than a beginner’s shortcut. Equilibrium shoving ranges are wide — heads-up at 10bb the small blind jams roughly half of all hands — and the big blind calls far wider than instinct suggests, because facing a 10bb shove it risks 9 more to win 11 and therefore needs only about 45% equity. The push or fold shoving ranges by stack depth cover where those thresholds sit.

ICM tightens the late stages

Everything above is chip-EV reasoning, and it is correct right up until the money matters. From the bubble onwards the payout ladder takes over: a call that breaks even in chips loses money in dollars, which is why tournament chips lose value as your stack grows. Calling ranges narrow, sometimes severely, while shoving ranges stay wide or widen further, because your opponents can afford fewer calls.

The extreme case is a satellite, where every qualifying seat pays the same. Chips above the qualifying threshold are worth almost nothing, and folding aces to a shove can be correct. To see the size of the effect for the stacks actually in front of you, run them through the ICM calculator — it prints the gap between each seat’s dollar equity and its naive chip share.

Why one chart set cannot cover MTTs

Count the variables. Nine seats early on and six or fewer late. Five or six meaningful stack bands between 100bb and 8bb. Ante or no ante. Chip EV, bubble, or a steep final-table ladder. Even that coarse grid — six seats, six bands, three payout contexts — is over a hundred opening charts, and opening is only the first decision node in the hand.

Printable charts are the wrong shape of answer for that problem. What travels is the reasoning: start from the positional ranges, move to the band your effective stack sits in, widen for antes, narrow the calls once ICM bites, and solve the handful of spots that keep recurring in the tournaments you actually play.