Deep Stack Starting Stacks and Structures
Some online poker tournaments may have a deceiving allure when they are announced as deep stack or double stack events. The normal reaction would be that you’d get more play for your money in a tournament that starts with 30,000 chips than in one that starts with 10,000. There are a lot of things to factor in when determining this.
Firstly, many deep stack online pokertournaments basically just mean that they begin you with a deep stack. Having 30,000 chips at a 25/50 blind level can gave its advantages. You can decide to play a lot of hands and try and snap people off, or you can literally wait for premium hands. You have a lot of options at the beginning of a deep stack event. These options may cease to run out quickly if the tournament has a poor structure. A lot of online events will boast that they are deep stacked, but not the fact that they have turbo blinds. This means that you get a lot of play in the early stages, and when you near the middle or end of a tournament, you have very few choices available to you. Short stacks cannot wait around and are forced to make moves, and big stacks have the clear advantage of picking their spots.
In many poorly run deep stack pokertournaments, the antes arrive way too soon. I played one a few weeks ago where the antes arrived on the third blind level. After two hours and fifteen minutes of a 3-day event, antes were introduced. You could tell, the organizers of this event just wanted to get things over with. They wanted people to feel they were in a very long and slow tournament, but all of the fine details pointed otherwise.
Also, take a look at the blind schedule. Sometimes critical blind levels are skipped. This one tournament went from 600/1200, to 800/1600, to 1,000/2,000 and then jumped to 2000/4000. The whole time the big blind was being increased by 400, and all of a sudden it is being increased by 2,000, a 5x jump. While they can’t keep the increases the same for the whole tournament, this one was drastic. How about a 1500/3000 level?
So, before you cough up the extra coin to play in a deep stack tournament, make sure that the structure looks like it will also run deep and give you lots of play. Who needs lots of play on day one when you can have it around the bubble?