20bb Tournament Ranges: Shove or Min-Raise

Twenty big blinds is the most argued-over stack in tournament poker, and the argument is usually framed wrong. It is not min-raise versus shove as a matter of style, with aggressive players jamming and careful players raising small. In the Simple GTO 8-max tournament trees, opens at 20bb are 2bb or all-in: both trees exist in the same solve, side by side, and specific hands choose specific lines for specific reasons. This piece is about that choice. What the min-raise preserves, what the jam buys, which hand classes lean which way, and how the answer bends at the neighboring depths of 25bb and 15bb.

Why 20bb keeps two trees

Deeper in a tournament, the open-shove would be absurd: risking 40bb to win the blinds and ante is a terrible trade when a 2.3bb raise achieves the same fold equity. Shallower, near 10bb, a small raise stops meaning much, since with all-in 3-bets behind it the open commits most of the range that makes it. 20bb sits at the point where both tools carry real weight. A 2bb open still leaves 18bb behind, enough to fold and continue playing, and a 20bb jam is still small enough relative to the ante-inflated pot to be a profitable risk with far more hands than feels natural.

The solve responds by refusing to choose. At 20bb and 15bb the 8-max opening decision is genuinely three-way, raise or jam or fold, and the interesting work is in the split. One structural fact towers over everything at this depth: in these trees, 3-bets at 20bb and below are all-in. There is no small 3-bet to maneuver against. Every min-raise is made knowing that the only raise it can face ends the hand, and every hand in the opening range needs its answer to that jam decided in advance.

What the min-raise preserves

The 2bb open is an option-preserving move, and the options it preserves are worth real equity.

First, it risks 2bb instead of 20bb. When the table folds, both lines win the same pot, and the raise got it done at a tenth of the exposure. Every steal that succeeds cheaply is pure profit margin over the jam.

Second, it keeps raise-fold alive. Because the 3-bet you face is an all-in, your open splits cleanly into hands that call it off and hands that let go. The bottom of your opening range gets to attack the pot and still escape for 2bb when someone moves in behind. An open-shove can never do that: its weakest hands are all-in the moment they act.

Third, it protects your action. Min-raising keeps dominated hands in the pot. The big blind defends wide against a 2bb open, and your premiums profit from being called by hands the shove would have folded out. Jamming aces wins the blinds; raising them small invites the mistakes that pay for the whole strategy.

What the open-shove buys

The jam gives up all of that flexibility and buys one thing of enormous value: it deletes the reshove.

Against a min-raise, every stack behind you with roughly 10bb to 25bb holds a weapon, the all-in 3-bet, that forces you to either call for your tournament life or surrender the pot plus your 2bb. Active tables use it constantly, and they use it precisely because it attacks the raise-fold region your min-raise was built around. The open-shove removes that weapon from every opponent at once. Nobody can jam over an all-in. They can only call, holding a hand strong enough to play for stacks, or fold, and most hands fold.

The shove also solves a problem inside your own strategy. Some hands occupy an awkward middle: strong enough that open-folding them burns money and folding them to a jam burns equity, not strong enough to be comfortable calling 18bb more. Min-raising those hands manufactures the worst spot in poker, invested and unsure. Jamming them converts the ambiguity into fold equity. You put the decision on the opponent, and every fold you generate is equity a min-raise would have had to fight for.

The ante underwrites the whole trade. These trees are solved on the 12.5% ante structure, which means the pot a 20bb jam attacks is already meaningfully fat before anyone volunteers a chip. Risking 20bb to win the blinds alone would be a thin proposition; risking it to win an ante-fed pot, against ranges that mostly fold, is a genuinely good price, and it is the reason the all-in survives in the tree at a depth where deep-stack instincts call it a punt.

Which hands prefer which tree

The split follows from the two sections above, and its logic runs roughly opposite to intuition.

The top of the range min-raises. Premiums want action, are delighted to call the all-in 3-bet, and lose customers by jamming. The bottom of the continuing range also leans on the min-raise, because raise-fold is exactly the cheap steal attempt those hands want, with a clean exit when the jam arrives. The pressure toward the all-in comes from the middle: hands with solid equity when called that nonetheless hate facing a reshove, the holdings that would find themselves squirming after a 2bb open meets an all-in. For them the jam is not recklessness, it is the line that avoids being bluffed off a hand that rates to be ahead.

That is the directional logic, and it is worth internalizing because it explains the chart rather than replacing it. Where each boundary falls, which specific hands mix between the trees and at what frequency, is exactly what the solve settles and intuition does not. Blockers matter, position matters, and the memberships shift depth by depth. Many hands do not commit to one tree at all: they mix, taking the raise some of the time and the jam the rest, which keeps either line from becoming readable. A player whose 20bb all-ins are only ever one narrow class of hand is broadcasting information the mixed strategy was built to hide. The tournament preflop charts show the actual split at every seat and stack as live grids, which beats reconstructing it from principles at the table.

Position tilts the mix

Both trees exist from every opening seat, but the balance between them moves around the table. From early position, many players remain behind, so a min-raise walks into the most reshove exposure while representing the strongest range. From the cutoff and button, fewer stacks can jam over you, the steal succeeds more often, and the raise-fold plan gets cheaper to run. The blinds' stack sizes matter as much as your own cards: min-raising into stacks that are exactly in reshove territory is a different proposition than raising into very short stacks that will simply call all-in, or deep ones with the freedom to flat. None of this changes the framework. It changes the weights, which is why the answer is a chart per seat rather than a rule.

The neighbors: 25bb and 15bb

Stack depth is a dial, not a set of rooms, and the 20bb logic makes more sense against its neighbors.

At 25bb, the open-shove drops out of the solved tree. Opens are a plain 2bb, and 3-bets have not yet collapsed to all-in, so there is still room for a raise, a reraise, and a decision after it. Jamming 25bb over the blinds is simply too much risk for the reward when the small raise carries the same threat at a fraction of the price.

At 15bb, both trees survive, but the terms shift. A 2bb open now leaves only 13bb behind, so the raise-fold line surrenders a meaningfully larger fraction of the stack each time it fires, and the all-in, now smaller relative to the ante-fed pot, becomes an even better price. The jam carries more of the load as the raise tree thins toward the collapse near 10bb. For the full arc of that transition, from the last full raise trees down to pure shove territory, the 10bb to 20bb zone covers the whole gradient; this piece is the close-up on its center.

What this looks like in practice

At the table, the two-tree strategy is less exotic than it sounds. Most of your 20bb opens are still 2bb raises. The jam is the specialist tool, deployed by the part of your range that needs it, and its presence disciplines everything else: opponents who know you can hold an open-shove cannot blindly attack your min-raises, and opponents who reshove anyway run into the calls your raise-first hands were built to make.

The failure modes are picking one tree for everything. The player who never open-jams at 20bb turns their whole range into a reshove target and gets bled by aggressive tables. The player who jams everything torches value with premiums, burns 20bb on steals a 2bb raise would have won, and turns marginal opens into all-in gambles nobody forced. Both leaks come from treating a solved mixed strategy as a personality choice, and both are visible to any observant opponent within an orbit or two, which makes them exploitable as well as expensive.

One more adjustment layer sits on top: these are chip-EV trees, and near a bubble or a final table, pay-jump pressure reshapes what a 20bb stack should risk, calling ranges most of all. ICM preflop ranges covers that layer. Baseline first, adjustments second.

Own the split, not the debate

The min-raise versus shove debate ends the moment you look at solved output: it was never a choice between two philosophies, just a range split by the reshove threat and the price of the steal. What remains is execution. Knowing that the middle jams and the edges raise is worth something; knowing exactly which hands sit where, from which seat, at 25bb and 20bb and 15bb, is worth much more, and that part is memorization from a correct source rather than reasoning at the table. The Simple GTO tournament ranges carry the full 8-max trees at ten depths from 100bb to 10bb on the 12.5% ante structure, with both trees intact where both trees exist. The most contested stack in tournament poker has an answer sheet. Most of the field is still debating it.