Marcus Bateman / Marcus Bateman / 12 May 2009 / Leave a comment

If you think of the two extreme possibilities of the ante structure in poker, with the first being no ante, and the second being an ante the size of your stack every hand, you can easily see how important the size of the ante is to how you play.

One of the most key considerations for poker players is what the structure of the blinds and antes is, as it has massive effects on what the correct strategy will be

In the first example, that of no ante, it basically makes sense for no player to ever play a hand except aces - they can simply wait as long as they need to for the hand that will give them the largest edge over everyone else. In the second example, that of an ante the size of everyone's stack, poker would lose all its skill, as every player would be all in every hand, and the game would just disintegrate into who had the most luck on a given day.

These two extremes though do give us a good insight into how you should be playing depending on the size of the ante though. In games with low antes, you can afford to be much tighter over all, as the pressure on your stack from the antes is quite low - you simply do not need to be trying to steal that much. Conversely, if the ante is much higher, you simply have to get in there and steal a lot, as you will not get sufficient action on your big hands to pay for all the antes you are losing on your marginal hands.

If you think of a $1/$2 stud game that has a .25c ante, you can see that you only need to win two or three big bets with your big hands to more than cover an orbit or two of folding. If you compare this to a $1/$2 game that has a $1 ante, you can easily see that even winning multiple big bets on your monster hands will barely cover the constant drain on your stack that this much larger ante creates.

One of the most key considerations for poker players is what the structure of the blinds and antes is, as it has massive effects on what the correct strategy will be. Although the clearest examples of this come from games with just an ante (such as the stud variants), it is just as applicable to no limit hold'em tournaments when the blinds get big, where your strategy has to change considerably compared to when playing very deep stacked.

Always think carefully about what the structure of the game that you are playing is - it may be that the players around you are the least of your problems in the game.

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