News / Matthew Pitt / 17 July 2008 / Leave a comment

In order to win poker tournaments you need to be fully focussed at all times but more important still, you need to have self-belief and a little bit of luck, writes Matthew Pitt.

If you have an average number of chips, the tournament should be relatively straight forward, but once your stack diminishes you will start to run into a whole array of problems.

Firstly, your "fold-equity" will be badly damaged meaning that if you do make a raise for all of your chips it is more likely that someone at the table will call you.

In addition, the range of hands you should play reduces in number due to you not having the correct implied odds required to make them profitable in the long run.

Sometimes, in unique situations, a player may find themselves so short-stacked they literally have only a single chip left in front of them.

This famously happened to Jack 'Treetop' Strauss in the 1982 World Series of Poker in Las Vegas.

During the first day of play, Strauss lost all his chips during a hand where he was all-in.

When he stood to leave, he noticed that he had one $500 chip that had slid under a napkin placed on the table. As he had not vocally declared himself all-in in the hand where he lost the rest of his stack, the tournament director allowed Strauss to continue playing.

He sat back in his seat, placed the solitary chip in front of him, and announced that he was all-in.

The details of the hand have been lost in time but Strauss won the hand, the next hand too and by the time the day's play had almost ended, he found himself heads-up against Dewey Tomko, a fellow professional poker player.

Both players ended up all-in, Tomko with Ad 4d and Strauss with Ah Tc, and when a four fell on the flop Strauss' amazing comeback looked as if had come to an end, but a ten was dealt on the river to give Strauss the title and $520,000 in winnings.

On that day a poker aphorism was born, one that will live on as long as poker does. Commit it to memory just in case you find yourself massively short of chips at the 2009 World Series of Poker Europe, remember Jack Strauss' story and that all you need is "a chip and a chair!"

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