Tournament rebuys.
Most MTTs offer their players the possibility to re-buy when they bust out of a tourney. I bet it happened to you too, that as soon as you managed to help someone finally leave your table, he soon resurfaced with a renewed stack of chips.
As frustrating that is for you, it is at least as useful for the guy making the re-buy, under certain circumstances.
Re-buying is to effectively buy yourself a second chance in a tournament after you’ve already killed the chance your initial buy-in provided you.
The good thing about the re-buy is that it basically gives you a new chip-stack when you’re already well into the tournament, and when already scores of players have probably busted out. It effectively gives you better odds than the initial buy-in.
With that in mind, under certain conditions, re-buying is indeed a good idea, under different circumstances however, it can just as well turn out a useless waste of time and money.
How do you now when to re-buy and when not to?
Before we elaborate any further on that matter, let’s get one more thing straight: in order to rebuy, you don’t need to be out of chips. You can pretty much choose to re-buy any time you like, even if it’s for the purpose of bolstering your stack.
We all know that in later stages of a tournament, a hefty bankroll makes all the difference in the world. One way of achieving an above-average bankroll is to rebuy.
In case you do bust out, the very first thing you need to consider when you want to rebuy is the opposition you were faced with before you dropped out. If you know you were better than most of them, and that you only lost due to an unusual streak of bad luck, it obviously makes a lot of sense for you to rebuy, since that’ll put you right back in the game. On the other hand though, if you were clearly outclassed by the opposition, and you busted out as a result of that, rebuying will probably only be a waste of precious resources, so don’t buy your way back.
Luck has a lot to do with making the above assessment. If you were unlucky, than a re-buy is probably a good idea, if you were lucky though and still lost, rebuying is not the right choice.
One more extremely important factor you have to consider is how much of a gap there is between the stacks that your opponents have built up for themselves and the chips you’ll be getting for your rebuy. If everyone at the table has over 10,000 chips, there’s little point in joining the battle again on 1,500. All you’ll see, are a few more hands before the blinds get to you. Even if you don’t get blinded out, you’ll be hopelessly dominated by the opposition. Under these circumstances, rebuying is – again – not a viable option.
Last, but not least, you have to ask yourself whether continuing on in the tournament is really what you want to do. Unless the answer to that is not a resounding ”yes”, there’s little point in investing any more of your bankroll into the game.
In other articles of mine, I’ve discussed the odds involved in going ”all-in” in a tournament. I stressed that even if a person held a definitive edge, going ”all-in” should be something he should avoid. Whenever you put your last chips on a bet, 60-40 odds in your favor do not sound all that good. You’d like something closer to 90-10.
In tourneys that offer the possibility for multiple rebuys, the all-in odds will be influenced. It is no longer imperative that you win the hand you go all-in on, so any play that comes with a positive EV, should be made. This will certainly lead to an ”all-in” frenzy early on in the tourney, effectively turning it into a lottery-like game of luck.
