Poker Satellite Strategy: How to qualify for the main events of live and online high stakes poker tournaments

By Dara O'Kearney and Barry Carter

The best way for small stakes players to win life-changing amounts of money is to win a satellite into a bigger tournament. Yet there is surprisingly little written about how to win satellite tournaments, until now. In Poker Satellite Strategy professional poker player Dara O’Kearney gives you a framework for how to approach every stage of a satellite tournament, from the early levels right up to the bubble. This book takes the stress and uncertainty out of satellites. 

You will learn:

· Adjustments you need to make from regular tournament play
· What hands to shove, call and fold on the bubble
· When to tighten up and when to keep accumulating chips
· How to adjust against different player types, dynamics and situations
· When it’s correct to fold Pocket Aces preflop

Dara O’Kearney is a professional poker player from Ireland with a long standing reputation as the best satellite specialist in the game. He has won over $1 million in satellite tournaments alone and twice won the PokerStars UKIPT satellite leaderboard. He is sponsored by Unibet Poker and is the co-host of The Chip Race Podcast.

“In the first 30 minutes of reading, I guarantee you will pick up something that will increase your future expectation to cover the cost of the book tenfold” – Marty “TheLipoFund” Mathis, Legendary Satellite Grinder

“A highly recommended book for anyone looking to play satellites well or related formats like Double or Nothing where multiple finishers receive identical top prizes” ~ Collin Moshman – author of Sit N’ Go Strategy

“Dara has been ahead of the curve on satellites for years and his results show it. This book will change the way you think about, and play, satellites forever.”~Daiva Byrne - professional poker player and advocate for women in poker

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barry Carter
• Release date: Apr 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9788832560749

Book preview

Poker Satellite Strategy

Dara O’Kearney

with

Barry Carter

Poker Satellite Strategy

Copyright © 2019 Barry Carter and Dara O’Kearney

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any forms or by any means, without written permission from the authors, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review. To request permission to use any part of the book in any way email: [e-mail].

ISBN: 978-1-5272-3809-1    

Cover design by Tiger-Fruit, www.tiger-fruit.com

Dara’s headshot courtesy of Tambet Kask and Unibet Poker.

www.dokearney.blogspot.com

www.pokermediapro.com

CONTENTS

Praise for Dara O’kearney

Whenever people ask me who the best satellite player I’ve played against it, I always say Tom Hall. He was a regular in all the satellites I played when I specialised in them. He gave me so much trouble at the tables I spent countless hours going through my Pokertracker database looking for any leaks I could exploit. He’s also one of my favourite people and I have nothing but respect and admiration for his work ethic and attitude to everything.

I have played with Dara for most of my poker career. I joined the tour" when I was maybe 22 years old. I always respected the guys who worked hard and put in volume, I never gave a shit about the luckboxes on heaters. Dara plays as much volume as I did when I was 23, you have to respect it. Satellites take a lot of experience to be able to make competent decisions in spots where there is no clear immediate answer. You have to have a feel for what will happen in the future given the circumstances. Lots of players do not have the discipline to be good at satellites.

This book should give you a good mindset and help you be ready to make big folds comfortably or unexploitable huge shoves, very important skill sets."

~Tom Hall

I met Daiva Byrne (or Barauskaite as she was at the time) in 2013 at the European Nations championship in Cyprus. We quickly became friends and study buddies. I have benefited greatly from her expertise in reading live player tendencies and her uncanny ability to home in on the most interesting part of the game tree in every hand, and I like to think she has benefited somewhat from my theoretical knowledge and expertise in satellites in general.

Dara has been ahead of the curve on satellites for years and his results show it. This book will change the way you think about, and play, satellites forever.

~Daiva Byrne

Carlos Welch is a professional poker player, coach, writer and everybody’s favourite podcast guest. The initial material for this book (and my webinar which preceded it) came from a 20 minute conversation I had with Carlos in Vegas the first year I was lucky enough to stay in the same house as him for the WSOP. After our chat, Carlos went off to play a satellite and I went to bed. By the time I woke up, Carlos had not only won a seat to the WSOP main event, but he’d also written up detailed notes on our chat and coined the term COC (central to satellite strategy, and explained in this book).

I've always considered myself a pretty good Single Table Satellite player due to my decade long experience with the format, but even I learned a lot from the many summer strategy discussions I had with Dara in Vegas. Since that time, I have become a regular in Multi Table Satellites with fantastic results including winning a seat to the WSOP Main Event. Thanks to the information in these pages, I am always one of the best players in the field. If you want to learn how to play with the same level of confidence, then you should definitely get Dara's book.

~Carlos Welch

Andrew Brokos is a poker pro, coach, cohost of the Thinking Poker podcast and a training instructor for Tournament Poker Edge. I've had the good fortune of sharing a house with him at the WSOP a few times.

Dara O'Kearney may just be the world's best satellite player. Certainly no one understands and explains the core strategic concepts as well as he does. I've learned a lot from him, and I'm sure you will too!

~Andrew Brokos

Gareth James is a professional poker player and coach who has acted as ICM coach to super high rollers. He hosts a podcast with Dr Tricia Cardner and a strategy channel on YouTube called MTTPokerSchool.

I bought Dara's satellite webinar in 2017, long before we became friends and started studying together. I was immediately struck by how articulate he was at explaining concepts and I am very confident that this book will be the go-to guide for anyone wanting to get really, really good at satellites.

~Gareth James

When I first met Daragh Davey, I saw him very much as a diamond in the rough. He was grinding live cash, but I was most impressed by his temperament and application. When I announced my decision to start staking him, almost everybody suggested I go with someone flashier, but my faith that Daragh could be turned into an online mtt crusher with minimal guidance was more than justified. He crushed online almost from the start, and won UKIPT Player of the Year twice live. Six years on, he’s still crushing.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough. The level of information in it has never been published before. I was staked by Dara O’Kearney for 14 months and the knowledge I gained off him during that period is still helping me over six years later.

~Daragh Davey

When I first met David Lappin, he’d been out of the game a little while, living in the US. He was trying to grind a living from a tiny ROI in Hyper Six Max SNGs on the basis that he could play 100 of them an hour. I suggested satellites as an easier and less stressful way, and after passing on the information in this book to him, we grinded them alongside Daragh Davey (who I was staking at the time) for a few sessions in my house. We were playing a lot of what were called 3x’s at the time: a super fast rebuy format with a giant add-on that made it compulsory to keep flicking in rebuys to get to the add-on. The average number of rebuys needed to do so was 11, and it wasn’t unusual to have to do 20. Daragh and I were distracted by the fact that Lappin would generally scream in rage at the screen every time he was compelled to rebuy, so I told him not to think of it as a $5 rebuy tournament, but as a $50 to $100 dollar buy-in tournament where you paid the buy-in in $5 instalments. I thought this would help with the screaming, but it really didn’t.

Despite his obvious tilt issues, David somehow became one of the best online satellite players around, so I told him about this book and asked for a testimonial:

The undisputed King of satellites, Dara O’Kearney, gives you all the tools you need to become a satellite crusher. Read this book and you’ll never have to pay the full buy-in ever again!

~David Lappin

What can I say about Kat Arnsby? She is a poker renaissance woman; former dealer and poker room manager, now a poker writer, online poker room manager and winning low-stakes player.

"As a recreational player I get battered from all sides with pros asking me to cough up money for their strategy: in the midst of all the noise, I trust Dara’s advice.

His ability to communicate tricky concepts in a way I can understand is invaluable. The best thing for my poker game would probably be to eat O’Kearney’s brain to absorb all the poker genius. The second best option is to digest his written strategy.

O’Kearney has proved he’s qualified to write this book. An absolute satellite master, over huge samples and a long time. If you want to unlock the mystery of satellites, I can’t think of a better key than Dara O’Kearney."

~Kat Arnsby

I first met Sameer Singh at a live event we’d both satellited into on PokerStars. He asked if I was SlowDoke (my online screenname on PokerStars), and when I confirmed that I was, he introduced himself as ender749. Sameer was one of the better satellite regs I’d battled for years every night online on different sites. We became fast friends and moved from SlowDoke and ender749 to Dara and Sameer.

Dara has a beautiful mind, he is able to both see and explain things in a way which mere mortals cannot. I've been lucky to study with him and I can say without doubt that this book will make you not just a better satellite poker player but also improve the way you think about poker.

~Sameer Singh

Rihards Dobelis is a professional poker player and coach who attended my satellite webinar (which presented most of the major concepts covered in this book). He subsequently tweeted that he’d used it to satellite into an online Sunday major which he went on to win (you should totally do this if it happens to you: I love hearing this kind of success story):

If there is anything I have learned from Dara's satellite strategy, then it is how to increase my COC. Yes, by COC I meant Chance of Cashing. Just recently I turned $22 satellite into $27,669 win in the Sunday Mega Deep on 888 poker. His satellite tips give solid foundation for bubble play even in regular tournaments.

~Rihards Dobelis

When I met Ian Simpson first, he’d just burst on the scene to win the Irish Open. Since then his laugh and his love of cats have become legendary.

Don’t buy this book, Iany’s ROI is low enough in satellites already

~Ian Simpson

When I first met the next person I asked to contribute to this section, he was something of a newcomer on the live scene, but already an accomplished tournament player with some eye catching results (8th in the 2017 WSOP main event, and wins in a 25K High Roller in Rozvadov, event 17 of the 2018 Aussie Millions and the JP Masters), and more recently he won the WSOPE Main Event. He was also undoubtedly the worst satellite player I’ve ever seen. One night when we were both drunk I decided to give him emergency satellite coaching. I’m not sure how much of it survived his hangover the next morning, but he does seem less clueless these days. He wrote the following recommendation on two conditions: it be attributed to Swaggy as he insists on calling himself, and there be no photo to identify him. It’s Sinclair why this Jack of all trades insisted on these two conditions, but we have to respect them:

Thanks to Doke’s coaching I was able to go from being awful at all tournies to only being awful at regular mtts

~Swaggy

When I started playing poker in 2007, Neil Channing was already a legend, both as a player and a personality. A star of late night TV poker, he exuded a sharp intelligent wit that set him aside from his peers. When he was at my very first table in the first major live event, I was starstruck. It was therefore a bit surreal when he started running hands by me at the WSOP less than a year later. When my brother expressed surprise at how many players of his stature were doing so, I confessed to being proud of that, but also pointed out that in the hands in question, the hero was always in some tricky spot like UTG or on the button facing a UTG open, they always had around 20 big blinds and something marginal (usually Ace Queen), it was always near the bubble, and it was always a satellite. Even back then, I was already the satellite guy.

Back in the mists of time professional poker players had one thing they could cling to and rely on. If the cash action was a little dry or there was a gap before the next big tournament you could always play a satellite, safe in the knowledge that people would be making major and fundamental mistakes while having absolutely no idea what they were doing wrong. Thanks a bloody lot Dara.

~Neil Channing

How to get the most out of this book

To get the most out of this book, we have made some assumptions about how familiar you are with some key concepts in poker. If you are unfamiliar with any of the following assumptions it is perhaps best to do a bit of independent research to bring you up to speed.

The first assumption is that you know how to play poker and understand basic terminology like Big Blind, Flop, 3-bet and Shove. If you do not currently know how to play poker you will be much better off spending your time googling how to play the game and using some of the many free resources available online, before studying satellite specific strategy.

We also assume that you have a basic understanding of how multi table tournaments work. You will have played quite a few of them, you understand the prize structures, you know how the strategy changes at different stages of the tournament and generally appreciate how they are different to cash games. We are heading into very obvious territory now but you should also know what a satellite tournament is. We will cover in depth the differences in approach between regular tournaments and satellites, but you will already be aware that in a satellite all the prizes are of equal value, rather than increasing prizes with every bustout. This is what makes them distinct from other tournament formats and in particular makes the bubble stage (the final position before the surviving players make the money) profoundly important.

You should have at least a small understanding of the concept of Independent Chip Model (ICM). This is a calculation used to understand the current real money value of your chip stack during different stages of a tournament. You don’t need to be an expert in this at all because we will be exploring it in some detail, but it would perhaps serve you well to do another quick Google search before you start reading so you at least know what we are referring to.

You should have an understanding of the concept of equity as it relates to a poker hand. For example, it well documented that most pocket pairs are close to 50/50 against two overcards, so they usually have equity of around 50%. Pocket Aces is a favourite against most hands and has more than 80% equity against most ranges. At the end of this book we have a chapter for common satellite scenarios that begins with some of the most common equities specific hands have against common ranges. Feel free to skip ahead and take a quick look at that section for a refresher. There are a lot of free poker equity calculators available online and for a smartphone, so if this is a new concept to you please download one of them and play around with it before you get to the ‘End Game’ chapters.

The examples in this book will not be about how to play a specific hand in a specific spot, but instead will look at different situations and then determine what range of hands you would need to call, shove or fold. As a poker player you should always be thinking in terms of your range anyway, but because in super satellites the big decisions you make are preflop, it is particularly important to think about all the hands you would play in each scenario. When we look at whether to call an all-in we will not be looking at it from the perspective of Ace King or Pocket Jacks, but the full selection of hands that would make a profitable call, and by inference the full range of hands we wouldn’t call with.

With that in mind, when we talk about a range of hands for brevity we start with the weakest part of that range that qualifies. So when we say your calling range is:

AJs+, ATo+, KQs, 88+, A4o-A3o

That means:

AJ, AQ and AK suited

AT, AJ, AQ and AK offsuit

A4 and A3 offsuit

KQ suited

88, 99, TT, JJ, QQ, KK, AA

Are all part of that range.

To highlight specific situations you find yourself in at the tables, we will be using tables that not only show the ideal shoving ranges, but also the ideal calling ranges of those shoves. This is so you can look at each scenario from the perspective of the aggressor and the defending player. For example, in this scenario:

In this situation the first player to act is the Cut Off (CO) with