Heads Up With Jason Koon

Jason Koon is an up-and-coming star on the tournament circuit. Known as “NovaSky”online, Koon has accumulated more than $1.5 million in tournament earnings, and he finished fourth in the WPT Festa al Lago main event. Card Player TV caught up with him to get his thoughts on preflop raise-sizing, and why it is trending smaller and smaller.
Jason Koon: When I first started playing, the standard size of a preflop raise was between the pot size and three times the big blind. Over time, this has gotten smaller, mainly because people understand the difference between deep-stack and shallow-stack play.
When you are raising in a tournament, you usually have an average stack of 30 to 40 big blinds, so raising large doesn’t give you enough room to maneuver post-flop, and you are making your steal attempts more expensive. By minimum-raising or raising 2.2 times or 2.5 times the big blind, you are reducing variance and giving yourself more room to work post-flop.
I think that a lot of people put more emphasis on it than is necessary. Raising 3.0 times or 2.5 times the big blind isn’t really that different. You’ll see players like Phil Ivey or other great players who play mainly cash games have a standard raise size in tournaments of around 2.8 times the big blind, and they still get deep in a lot of tournaments.
Over the course of a million hands, maybe it will make a noticeable difference, but it is mostly irrelevant unless you are raising four times the big blind as opposed to a min-raise. An opening-raise size of three times the big blind may get more folds from some people. If people are defending their blinds too much, you should make your opening raise a little bit heftier, to show a bigger profit against someone who is calling every time from the big blind. If you play against a person who is folding his big blind too much, you can open for a min-raise. ♠