1️⃣ When stacks are still deep, avoid calling hands that don’t perform well at these depths to limit variance.
2️⃣ Gradually widen your calling range as stacks get shorter to avoid missing valuable EV.
3️⃣ The BTN often shoves too wide when deep… but not wide enough when short.
4️⃣ The BB calls too wide, which means you should tighten your calls even more early in the game.
Two elements should guide your response to a BTN shove:
These two factors vary depending on stack depth and must shape your calling strategy.
Let’s break it down.
Recreational players on the Button tend to shove too much when they have a deep stack. And conversely, when they get short, they don’t shove enough.
Here’s the BTN open-shove percentage of recreational players compared to GTO:
When deep, they over-shove a merged range, including some dominated hands (A4o, KJo, 22).
When short, they become overly cautious — and still build unbalanced ranges.
Let’s dive deeper:
At 13bb, here’s the BTN open-shove range of recreational players vs. GTO:
As you can see, their range is poorly built because:
Recreational players in the BB tend to call all-ins way too loosely.
Here’s a table comparing their call percentage when BTN shoves and SB calls vs. GTO:
As you can see, recs call much more than GTO would recommend.
Now that we’ve seen how recreational players behave on the BTN and in the BB, let’s see how to exploit these mistakes in two parts.
As you've probably noticed by now, some hands might appear slightly EV+, but lead to high variance spots that can be avoided.
Examples: A8s, KJs, KTs… EV+ on paper, but too often dominated to be worth it.
➡ Prefer calling with solid hands: ATo+, A9s+, 55+
Between 14 and 18bb, we keep a very tight calling range — even tighter than GTO:
As stack depth decreases, you’ll have fewer future opportunities to recoup missed EV.
From 10bb and below, it becomes necessary to widen your calling range a bit to capture available EV — accepting some added variance.
