Explanation of Cripple
Consider the situation in a Hold’em game where we hit an exceptional hand.
Board: AKK
Hand: AA
We might refer to ourselves as having the deck crippled because the likelihood of one of our opponents drawing a better hand than us is nearly nonexistent. It's important to highlight the word 'virtually' here, as there remains a slight chance of being outdrawn. For example, an opponent holding a King could end up making quads by the river. Although the term crippled implies that we cannot be beaten at all, it's commonly used to discuss scenarios where the chances of being outdrawn are just very low.
Example of Cripple in Context -> (Hold’em) we managed to flop a top set on a board that didn’t offer many draws, effectively giving us the deck crippled .
Utilizing Cripple in Your Poker Strategy
In tournament settings, once our chip stack gets crippled , we should actively seek out any opportunity to double our stack as soon as possible, even if our initial hand looks unpromising. This advice mostly applies when we find ourselves with 5 big blinds or fewer and don’t have any immediate ICM (Independent Chip Model) considerations that prevent us from going all-in. (For instance, we could be close to the bubble in a double-or-nothing tournament where our opponent has a smaller stack than we do.) Even with stacks of around 10 big blinds, we shouldn’t label ourselves as crippled since we still possess the ability to make calculated decisions about shoving or waiting for a better hand.
See Also
Tournaments , ICM , Hand Rankings , Bubble , Blind , Big Blind