Drill PokerIn every tournament there comes a moment when poker stops being a game of flops, reads and thin value bets. Your stack has shrunk to a dozen blinds — and you have two actions left: all-in or fold. This is the push/fold zone, the most thoroughly solved part of poker: for every hand, position and stack, the mathematically correct answer is known. The player who has learned those answers takes chips from the one playing "by feel" — steadily, and with no magic involved.
The good news: this is the fastest way to improve tournament results. Postflop takes years to learn; push/fold takes a couple of weeks.
Why push/fold works
A shove draws its power from two sources, and winning either one is enough.
Fold equity. When you move all-in, opponents fold most of their hands: there is no "seeing a cheap flop" against a shove. Every such fold hands you the blinds and antes in full — dead money nobody fought for.
Showdown equity. Even when the shove gets called, your hand wins its share of pots. Shoving A5s into a calling range isn't a disaster — it's roughly 40% equity, on top of all the times the call never came.
Add the two together and it turns out a short stack profitably shoves far more hands than intuition suggests. From the small blind at 10 BB, the correct shove is more than half of all possible hands.
Now compare the alternatives. Limping at 8 BB puts no pressure on anyone and leaves you with no plan against a raise. A min-raise commits a quarter of your stack in a way that makes folding afterwards a mistake — yet generates half the fold equity of a shove. Both lines lose to shoving almost always, and that is exactly why a short stack is played with two buttons.
The edge of the range is where the money is
Push/fold mistakes don't live in the middle of the range — they live at the edge. Everyone shoves AK. Chips are lost on hands like A4o, K9s and 66: they get folded where they should be shoved — and the stack burns away in the blinds — or shoved where they should be folded, and the tournament ends.
At 10 BB on the button, A8o is a confident shove: only two players remain behind you, and most of their hands cannot call.
Push from BTN, 10 BB stack
The same hand from early position is a fold: seven opponents behind you means too high a chance of meeting a dominating ace. Position changes the decision more than the hand itself does — that is the main reflex you'll be building.
How to train it
Knowing the chart and playing by the chart are different skills: at the table you get seconds. A scheme that builds the reflex in two weeks:
- Ten minutes a day in the trainer — random hand, position and stack, answer "push" or "fold", instant checking against the Nash range.
- Start at 8–12 BB — the most common zone in real tournaments. Then add 5–8 BB, and leave 15–20 BB for last.
- Review mistakes on the 13×13 grid. After every miss, look beyond your own hand at the boundary: which neighbouring hands are still shoves, which no longer are.
- Target 90% accuracy with a streak of 30+. That's the sign you know the range instead of guessing it.
Once the base is in place, add the layers on top: calling against someone else's shove is a separate, tighter skill, and adjusting for the tournament stage is the subject of ICM.