Push-Fold Charts Drift 22% Once Ante Tables Reseat
Poker coaches have sold push-fold charts as static reference points for more than a decade: a 10-big-blind shove range is a 10-big-blind shove range, printed on a laminated card, memorized, applied. But when researchers at a mid-stakes training site re-ran 1.4 million hand simulations across ante and non-ante table configurations last spring, the recommended shoving range for the same stack depth shifted by as much as 22 percent depending on whether antes were in play — and the direction of the shift was not uniform across positions. The chart didn't just get wider or tighter. It moved sideways.
That finding matters more now than it would have in 2015, because ante tables have quietly become the default in US-facing tournament lobbies. Cardrooms in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and West Virginia have expanded ante-based structures since 2022, and most major online tournament series now run with a big blind ante rather than a traditional per-player ante. Players who learned push-fold from a chart built for a no-ante structure are, in effect, using a map drawn for a different game.
What the 22 Percent Actually Measures
The number comes from a comparison of Nash equilibrium shoving ranges, not from observed player behavior. Researchers ran a solved heads-up and multi-way simulation for stack depths from 6 to 15 big blinds, first with no ante, then with a big blind ante equal to one big blind, then with a traditional ante equal to one-tenth of the big blind. The 22 percent figure is the largest single-node divergence — it appeared at the small blind shove decision at 9 big blinds with a full big blind ante, where the equilibrium shoving range expanded from roughly 41 percent of hands to just over 50 percent.
That's the headline. The more useful detail is in the distribution. At 6 big blinds, the ante barely moved the range — about 3 percent wider. At 9 to 11 big blinds, the divergence peaked. By 15 big blinds, the effect had flattened again because the ante's relative contribution to the pot shrank against the stack. In other words, the drift is not a constant multiplier you can apply to your existing chart. It's a curve that peaks in the middle of the push-fold zone.
There's a second wrinkle the researchers flagged but didn't emphasize in the abstract: the drift runs in both directions depending on position. Late position shoves widened more than early position shoves, which is intuitive — you're risking fewer players' hands to pick up a bigger pot. But the big blind's calling range tightened slightly at some depths, not because the ante changed the math of calling but because the shover's range composition changed. When your opponent's shoving range includes more marginal hands, your calls with the bottom of your range get worse.
The Big Blind Ante Is Not a Traditional Ante
A lot of players treat "ante" as a single variable. It isn't. A traditional ante, where every player posts a fraction of a big blind, changes the pot odds at every decision point. A big blind ante, where one player posts the whole thing, changes the pot odds and changes the big blind's effective stack. The big blind is now playing a shorter effective stack than everyone else at the table, which distorts the calling range in ways a per-player ante does not.
The simulation data bears this out. At 10 big blinds with a traditional ante, the equilibrium small blind shove range was about 46 percent of hands. At 10 big blinds with a big blind ante, it was about 49 percent. Same nominal ante size, three percentage points of divergence, because the big blind's stack-to-pot ratio was different. Charts that say "with ante, shove X" without specifying which ante structure are, at best, imprecise and, at worst, wrong at the margins where push-fold decisions are actually close.
Why Charts Drift in the First Place
Push-fold charts are not laws of poker. They're outputs of a solver run under specific assumptions: stack sizes, blind levels, ante structure, number of players, and — critically — the assumed calling ranges of opponents. Change any input and the output moves. The reason charts felt stable for so long is that the inputs were stable. A $10 buy-in turbo on a major site in 2014 ran the same structure as the same tournament in 2018. Players could memorize one chart and use it for years.
That stability is gone. Tournament structures now vary by site, by series, by day of the week. A player grinding four tables on a Tuesday night might be sitting at a big blind ante table, a traditional ante table, and two no-ante tables simultaneously. The push-fold chart in their head is calibrated for one of those, and they may not know which.
The Solver Assumption Nobody Checks
The deeper problem is the assumed calling range. Most published push-fold charts are built against a "reasonable" opponent calling range — usually something like 20 to 30 percent of hands for a big blind call at 10 big blinds. But in low and mid-stakes US tournaments, the actual calling range is often tighter than that, because recreational players over-fold to shoves. If the real calling range is 15 percent instead of 25 percent, the equilibrium shoving range widens considerably, and the ante effect compounds on top of that.
This is where the 22 percent figure gets slippery. It's a solver-versus-solver number. Against real opponents who fold too much, the ante-driven widening could be larger or smaller depending on how the population's calling range responds to ante structures. The researchers acknowledged this in a footnote: their model assumed opponents played equilibrium, which almost no one does.
What This Means for Players Grinding US Tournaments
The practical takeaway is not "memorize a new chart." It's that the chart you memorized is a starting point, not an answer, and the ante structure is one of the inputs you need to adjust for. A few concrete adjustments follow from the data.
At 8 to 12 big blinds with a big blind ante, widen your late-position shoves by roughly 8 to 12 percent of hands. That means adding hands like suited gappers and offsuit broadways that a no-ante chart would fold. The exact number depends on your position and the number of players left to act, but the direction is consistent.
Tighten your big blind calls slightly against shoves from early position. The early-position shover's range under a big blind ante is wider than a no-ante chart suggests, but the composition shifts toward hands that have better equity against your calling range. The net effect is that marginal calls — the bottom 10 to 15 percent of your calling range — become closer to break-even, and at some depths they tip negative.
Don't apply a uniform multiplier. The drift is not linear. If you widen every shove by 22 percent, you'll be too wide at 6 big blinds and not wide enough at 10. The peak is in the middle.
The Ante Is Not the Only Variable Moving
It's worth noting that ante structures are just one of several inputs that have shifted in US tournament poker over the past three years. The rise of "mystery bounty" formats, the spread of progressive knockout structures, and the increasing prevalence of re-entry formats have all changed the incentive calculus at push-fold depths. A mystery bounty changes the value of survival in ways that a pure chip-EV chart doesn't capture. A re-entry format changes the value of a chip in the early levels. None of these are baked into the standard push-fold chart.
The ante drift is the most measurable of these effects because it's purely structural — it doesn't depend on opponent behavior or prize pool distribution. But it's part of a broader pattern: the charts players rely on were built for a game that no longer exists in its original form.
The Chart Industry's Response
The companies that publish push-fold charts have been slow to update. Most major training sites still offer a single "with ante" toggle rather than separate charts for big blind ante and traditional ante. A few have added a big blind ante option in the past 18 months, but the underlying solver runs are often years old and may not reflect current population tendencies.
One training site, which asked not to be named because it's mid-rebuild of its chart library, told me it's re-running its entire push-fold database with separate ante configurations and expects to publish updated charts by Q1 2025. That's a 12-to-18-month lag between when the structural shift happened in the lobbies and when the reference material catches up. In the interim, players are using charts that are, by the publisher's own admission, miscalibrated.
The lag isn't entirely the publishers' fault. Re-solving push-fold trees for every ante configuration, stack depth, and player count is computationally expensive, and the market for $50-a-month training subscriptions is not large enough to justify the cost for every variant. But the gap between what the charts say and what the math says is widest exactly where players are most likely to consult a chart — the 8-to-12-big-blind zone.
What a Corrected Chart Would Look Like
A properly calibrated push-fold chart for 2024 US tournament conditions would need at least four dimensions: stack depth, position, number of players remaining, and ante structure. It would also need a population-adjustment layer, because the equilibrium assumption is wrong against real opponents. That's a lot more complex than a laminated card.
Some of this complexity can be collapsed. The ante effect is largest in the 8-to-12-big-blind range, so a chart could use a single correction factor for that band and a smaller one outside it. The position effect is already captured in most charts. The player-count effect is the hardest to collapse, because it changes the number of opponents who can wake up with a hand, but it's also the one players are most likely to intuit correctly.
The realistic outcome is that charts will get more granular, not more accurate in a universal sense. A chart that's correct for a nine-handed big blind ante table at 10 big blinds is not correct for a six-handed traditional ante table at the same depth. Players will need to know which chart applies to which table, which is a different skill than memorizing a single range.
The Open Question
The 22 percent figure is a solver output, not an observed win rate. Nobody has published data showing that players who use no-ante charts at ante tables lose more money than players who use correctly calibrated charts. That study would be hard to run — you'd need a large sample of players willing to have their hand histories analyzed, and you'd need to control for skill, which is the variable that swamps everything else at low stakes.
So the honest version of the claim is this: the charts are wrong by a measurable amount, the error is largest in the zone where push-fold decisions matter most, and the reference material hasn't caught up. Whether that error translates into a meaningful edge for players who adjust is an empirical question that nobody has answered yet.
What is clear is that the assumption of a stable push-fold chart — one range, one card, one answer — was always a simplification. The ante shift just made the simplification visible. The next time you're at 10 big blinds on a big blind ante table and your chart says fold, it's worth asking which chart you're actually holding.