By Brandon Adams
When I first started playing tournament poker, I tended to bust near the bubble.

I would play very tight in the early stages, and then as the blinds and antes rose, I’d wait for good hands and push in. This frequently resulted in me busting with good but not great hands, such as A-Jo or T-T.

Busting with a hand like a pair of tens near the bubble is, in some ways, a respectable thing to do. When your friends ask you how you busted, you can say, “I was short-stacked and I reraised all in for twelve big blinds with a pair of tens,” and they will say, “Oh, well. You had to push there.” They’d be right, and in my early days I’d take some consolation in their assurances that my bustout was unavoidable. But after a while, I started to ask myself, “Why’d I only have twelve big blinds at that point?”

Watching tournament poker live and on TV, I’d seen players make moves that seemed incomprehensible to me. I’d watch pros reraise all in pre-flop with hands like 7.8. or 6.8., and I’d think to myself, “How could they possibly risk busting out on that hand?”

That question, together with the question of why I never had chips near the end of a tournament, led me to discover a critical flaw in my thinking. I realized that most of my decisions about hand values had been influenced by charts in beginner poker books showing the probability of a particular hand, say T-T, holding up against two random cards. I had neglected to fully consider…. read rest of article at Bluff Magazine