All-In

All-in is betting your entire stack. You cannot be forced out of the hand afterwards, and you cannot win more than you put in.

Side pots

This is the mechanic people get wrong. If you go all-in for £50 and two opponents continue betting, you can only win £50 from each of them, the matched amount.

Any further betting creates a side pot, contested only by the players with chips remaining. You can win the main pot and lose the side pot, which is why a short stack going all-in and winning does not scoop everything.

Multiple all-ins at different stack sizes create multiple side pots, layered in order.

Tournament versus cash

In a tournament, all-in means elimination if you lose. Chips cannot be replenished, so the decision carries survival value beyond its chip value. This is why tournament strategy diverges from pure chip expectation, and why ICM (Independent Chip Model) calculations exist.

In a cash game, you can rebuy immediately. An all-in is just a large bet, and the correct decision is straightforwardly whichever maximises expected value.

Push-fold

Late in tournaments, blinds and antes grow large relative to stacks. Below roughly 10–15 big blinds, post-flop play becomes impractical: any meaningful bet commits most of your stack anyway.

At that point the game reduces to push or fold. Go all-in pre-flop or fold. This is a solved problem; Nash equilibrium charts specify exactly which hands to shove from which position at which stack depth, and serious tournament players memorise them.

It is a strange feature of poker that the endgame is the most mechanical part.

All-in equity

When players are all-in with cards to come, most platforms display running equity percentages. Common pre-flop matchups:

Matchup	Approximate equity
Pair vs two overcards	55 / 45
Pair vs lower pair	82 / 18
Pair vs one overcard	70 / 30
Two overcards vs two undercards	65 / 35

The first row is the famous one. A “coin flip” or “race”, which tournaments are frequently decided by.