Tourney Matt Savage’s recent blog post on big blind antes (1 Viewer)

I wonder what's the 60,000 chips 100-base distribution, is it going to be 10-2-8-10 for 3 even stacks of 10? And regarding BBA whether BB first then Ante or vice versa, I prefer the former and if I insist on antes, I use Button Ante to balance the advantage of being the last to act if no one has raised.
 
Is there a term “effective big blind”? Playing in these tourneys is really a SB/4xSB instead of a SB/2xSB tourney. You can call the BB/ante anything you want, but it is still “effectively” 4xSB, and it does require adjustment, especially about three or four hours in a long tourney.
It’s 4xSB even if your heads up in the tourney so “incremental so it’s the same” doesn’t hold.

I feel that it makes the middle position stealing/semi bluffing even more important, especially when the blinds get worth taking. You almost have to win a hand every blind level if your not deepstacked, and two hands a level would be optimal just to stay even. It does force more aggression in the middle levels it seems.


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Is there a term “effective big blind”? Playing in these tourneys is really a SB/4xSB instead of a SB/2xSB tourney. You can call the BB/ante anything you want, but it is still “effectively” 4xSB, and it does require adjustment, especially about three or four hours in a long tourney.
It’s 4xSB even if your heads up in the tourney so “incremental so it’s the same” doesn’t hold.

I feel that it makes the middle position stealing/semi bluffing even more important, especially when the blinds get worth taking. You almost have to win a hand every blind level if your not deepstacked, and two hands a level would be optimal just to stay even. It does force more aggression in the middle levels it seems.
There is certainly some adjustment to a BBA structure versus a traditional ante structure. But those adjustments are primarily (1) when you are extremely shorthanded, like <6-8 BB, and you both benefit from playing multiple "free" hands in a row but also have to be concerned about having to put in 2 BBs when it's your turn, or (2) when the table is shorthanded, and the antes make the per-orbit cost higher and therefore call for increased aggression. It shouldn't make much difference to your strategy at reasonable stack sizes at a full-ring table. And in my experience I think the effect sort of disappears in heads-up situations, because reasonable heads-up playable ranges are so wide that it's pretty rare to go orbit after orbit blinding down. It's certainly a factor if you are super short and card-dead in a heads-up situation though, no doubt.

I wouldn't really agree with the characterization that it's a SB/4xSB, because an ante isn't the same as a blind. It's dead money, not a live bet, and assuming you are comparing it to a traditional ante structure the per-orbit cost shouldn't be materially different. If you're going to make a fair comparison it would be SB/4xSB versus 1.25xSB/2.25xSB/0.25xSB/0.25xSB/0.25xSB/0.25xSB/0.25xSB/0.25xSB/0.25xSB.
 

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