Short-Stack Push/Fold Charts (10 to 15bb)

Every tournament run, good or bad, spends serious time at 10bb to 15bb. Blinds climb faster than stacks grow, so you face far more of these decisions than deep-stacked ones, and each of them puts an entire tournament life on the line. This is the territory of the push/fold chart: a solved answer sheet for the depths where the central question is whether the chips go in before the flop. It is the rare poker study object that is finite, learnable, and immediately profitable. This guide covers what these charts actually are, why the all-in regime exists, both sides of the jam, and the two leaks that quietly fund everyone else at the table.

What a push/fold chart actually is

A push/fold chart is a solved preflop strategy for spots where the realistic options have collapsed to two: move all-in or fold. For every hand in the deck and every seat at the table it gives you the answer, and for hands on the boundary it gives a mixed frequency rather than a verdict. There is no postflop plan attached, because there is usually no postflop to plan for.

What separates a solved chart from the laminated shove cards that have floated around poker rooms for years is where the answer comes from. The old cards were built from simplified models, often heads-up jamming math stretched to cover a full table. A solved chart is the output of a genuine multi-seat solve at a specific depth and ante structure, so the ranges respond to everything the model can see: how many players remain behind you, what the ante does to the price, and what the calling ranges look like when someone wakes up with a hand. The Simple GTO tournament coverage includes a dedicated push/fold scenario along with its mirror, the call push tree, and the viewer serves both as live push fold charts with the real frequencies attached, not static images.

Why the regime exists: SPR and fold equity

Two forces create the push/fold regime, and understanding them tells you when to trust the chart.

The first is stack-to-pot ratio. At 12bb, any raise leaves a pot so large relative to your remaining stack that continuing is close to automatic. Raise small, face a jam, and the price makes folding most of your continuing range a mistake. See a flop, face a bet, and calling commits you anyway. When every road leads to your stack going in, the decision that actually matters is the first one, and the honest version of that decision is often to put the stack in yourself rather than in installments.

The second is fold equity. The all-in is the one bet that cannot be raised. It applies maximum immediate pressure, never faces a reraise that puts you to a hard decision, and never gets blown off its equity on a bad flop. A 12bb stack that jams a middling pair gets to realize every percentage point of that hand's equity. The same stack that raises small and then plays a flop out of position realizes far less, because short stacks are terrible at converting equity across streets. The jam opts out of that problem entirely.

The ante makes the whole trade better. Dead money sits in the pot before anyone acts, so a jam risks your stack to win something already worth fighting over. That is why solved short-stack ranges look aggressive to players raised on deep-stack instincts: the price genuinely is that good.

Both sides of the jam are solved

A push/fold chart is really two charts, and most players only ever study one of them.

The jamming side is built on fold equity plus equity when called. The calling side has no fold equity at all: once the shove is in front of you, nothing you do makes anyone fold, so calling is a pure equity decision against the jammer's range at the price the pot is offering. That asymmetry means correct calling ranges are dramatically tighter than jamming ranges. A hand can be a completely standard jam from one seat and a clear fold against the same jam from another, and there is no contradiction in that. The two decisions are answering different questions.

This is why the Simple GTO tournament trees solve both seats of the confrontation: push/fold and call push, plus the related spots where the all-in comes second, the rejam over an open and the call rejam facing one. If you only memorize jamming ranges, you have solved half the zone. The other half is the discipline to fold hands that feel too pretty to release when a shorter stack moves in, and that half is where the chips actually leave most players' stacks.

Position moves the ranges more than the cards do

Nothing reshapes a push/fold range like the number of players left to act. From an early seat at an 8-max table, most of the field still sits behind you, and every one of those players is a chance for someone to hold a hand that snaps you off. The jamming range from up front is accordingly tight. Slide around the table and the range widens seat by seat, for the same reason opening ranges widen deeper-stacked: fewer players behind means fewer ways to run into a calling hand, and a larger share of the pot already belongs to players who are forced to act after you.

The extreme case is the small blind. Folded to, you face exactly one opponent holding a random hand, you already have money in the pot, and the ante has sweetened what is in the middle. Correct small blind jamming ranges at these depths are wider than almost anyone's instincts, which is precisely why they are worth memorizing rather than estimating. The big blind is the mirror image: it is rarely the jammer and constantly the target, so its job in this zone is calling discipline. The same hand at the same depth can be a jam from one blind and a fold from the seat next to it, and the chart is the only reliable way to keep those answers straight.

Ante versus no ante

Push/fold ranges are solved for a pot, and the ante changes the pot. With a 12.5% ante in play, every steal and every jam risks the same amount to win more, so correct ranges widen across every seat. Without the ante, the identical stack in the identical seat has a worse price, and the ranges tighten to match.

This is not a detail you can wave at. A jamming range built for an ante structure is simply too loose in a game without one, and a no-ante range is too tight the moment antes kick in. The Simple GTO tournament 8-max trees are solved in ante and no-ante variants at the short depths for exactly this reason: you match the chart to the structure in front of you instead of averaging across two different games. Most modern tournaments run antes from early on, but not all structures do, and the short-stack depths are where the difference bites hardest.

The two leaks that fund the table

Short-stack mistakes cluster into a matched pair, and the pairing is not an accident.

The first leak is jamming too tight from the small blind. Folded to in the small blind at 10bb to 15bb, the correct jamming range is wide enough to feel reckless: one opponent, a dead-money pot, and fold equity against the large majority of the big blind's holdings. Players who fold hands here that the solve happily jams are not being prudent, they are declining a profitable bet over and over, and the loss never announces itself because nothing visible goes wrong.

The second leak is calling too loose from the big blind, and it feels like the opposite of the first but comes from the same misunderstanding. Being the target of constant jams is frustrating, and the pot always looks big enough to defend. But a call has no fold equity, so it needs real equity against the jamming range, and the pot odds are rarely as generous as they feel. The player who jams too tight and calls too loose has both halves of the zone backwards, and correcting either one is worth more than most postflop study.

Where push/fold ends and the raise tree begins

The chart does not own everything short. At 15bb, the solved 8-max tree still carries small raises alongside the jam: opens are 2bb or all-in, and both trees genuinely exist. Even at 10bb the open is nominally 2bb, but with 3-bets behind it being all-in, a raise at that depth functions as a commitment for most of the range that makes it. The all-in-or-fold picture is truest at the bottom of the zone and blurrier at the top.

Which hands take the small raise and which take the jam at 15bb to 20bb is its own decision problem, and it is covered properly in the 10bb to 20bb zone, which walks through what each tree preserves and where the raise finally gives way. This piece is the chart-focused companion: whatever the mix, the jamming and calling ranges themselves have to come from somewhere, and that somewhere should be a solve rather than a feel.

The highest-ROI memorization in poker

Push/fold charts reward memorization better than anything else in the game. The decisions are binary or close to it, the spots repeat constantly, and the set of answers is finite. A few focused sessions with the right charts convert the most stressful stretch of a tournament into a sequence of known answers, and the edge compounds because these depths recur every single time the blinds catch up with the field. The method for making ranges stick is its own topic, covered in how to memorize preflop ranges.

One honest caveat: these are chip-EV baselines. They maximize chips, which is the right target for most of a tournament, but on a bubble or at a final table the pay jumps tighten correct ranges, calling ranges most of all. ICM preflop ranges covers when and how to adjust. Learn the baseline first; you cannot adjust from a range you never knew.

The full set lives in the Simple GTO tournament ranges: ten depths from 100bb down to 10bb on the 12.5% ante structure, with ante and no-ante variants at the short depths, covering the jam, the call, the rejam, and everything above them. The zone that decides tournaments is the one part of poker you can genuinely solve in advance. Take the free money.