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What is smallballing?
I saw this series on smallballing on youtube with daniel negreanu and it looked interesting. I tried a few of the basic tactics in a freeroll tournament with mixed results. It seemed to work really early on and in the middle stages, and twice I was able to take a massive pot when I hit a really nice hand, but in the later stages and against players who were paying attention it seemed to not work so well. What do you know about this strategy and when is it applicable and unapplicable? Where can I find more info on it?
Public Comments
- where your ball are squeezed by your bitch and you lose all control of your life. Your fucking screwed cunt
- Smallballing is the concept of playing lots of small pots, rather than getting involved in larger pots that can cost more of your stack to play. Daniel Negreanu and Phil Hellmuth Jr. both love to use this kind of play. Sometimes you'll see Daniel play over 80% of his starting hands if he can limp or see the flop for cheap. The theory goes that by keeping the pots small, there is less risk per hand than getting in huge stacks of cash before the flop. It is also minimizing the luck factor, and therein lies the problem. The reason so many pros like this technique is because they can use their expert reading skills to play after the flop. They know when to get away from a hand when they are beaten and when to push a hand if they sense weakness. The problem with trying to emulate these smallball techniques is that you are not Daniel Negreanu! It takes expert play to play a hand perfectly or near perfect on every street. As an amateur player you will not be able to make the incredible analysis that world class professionals do, so this technique is more likely to get you involved in situations that you do not have the ability to handle. It only takes a few wrong moves to get yourself in a lot of trouble.
- small ball is my personal strategy for tournament play, and if you are a good player it is by far the best strategy to play in tournaments...the base idea is that you should play lots of pots with lots of speculative hands and be aggressive with them, hoping to win a lot of small pots in the process with the aggressive tactics...however, when a big pot is played, you should have the goods 99.9% of the time, and you will get paid off more often than most because you won't get credit for having a big hand this strategy works best in deepstack tournaments, where you have a lot of chips in comparison to the blinds...this is because you want to play your speculative hands aggressively, but you also want to make sure that it doesn't cost too much of your stack to play...if you don't have many chips in relation to the blinds(a point which occurs pretty quickly in online tournaments, since the blinds go up quickly), then the strategy becomes ineffective because it costs too much of your stack to call with a speculative hand and hope to hit something, not to mention that you likely wouldn't be able to win much from your opponent since a lot of his stack would be in the pot also however, zct is absolutely correct in that this strategy can be very risky for an amateur to attempt because it is very difficult...you are constantly making decisions, some of which can be very difficult, and it is mentally draining to be playing so many pots and seeing so many flops and making so many decisions...if you make one misstep you could lose a lot of money, so you should beware using this until you become very comfortable with your post-flop play if you go to cardplayer.com and read some of daniel's articles from tournaments he has played, you will get a good feel for what playing small ball is about
