An interactive push-or-fold chart for short-stack tournament poker. Pick a position and stack depth to see exactly which hands to shove all-in — and switch tabs to see which hands the big blind should call with. Ranges are chip-EV (Nash-style) baselines; adjust for antes and ICM as described below.
A push/fold chart is a short-stack reference that answers a single question: with this hand, in this seat, at this stack depth, should you move all-in or fold? When your stack drops into the 5–15 big blind range, you no longer have room for a standard open-raise. If you raise to 2.5bb and face a shove, you've committed a chunk of your stack with no good options. So the decision tree collapses to two branches — push or fold — and those branches can be solved with math.
The chart above is built from position-by-position shove ranges that mirror the ranges used in our preflop range trainer, so what you study here is exactly what you'll be drilled on there. Each colored cell is a hand you shove; each dark cell is a fold. The 13×13 grid is the standard poker hand matrix: pairs run down the diagonal, suited hands sit in the upper-right, and offsuit hands fill the lower-left.
There's no hard line, but here are the practical thresholds most winning tournament players use:
This is why the depth selector above runs from 15bb down to 5bb. The shorter your stack, the wider every range gets, because a shorter shove needs opponents to fold less often to show a profit — and they need a stronger hand to call.
Every shove is a wager that combines two ways to win: opponents fold, or they call and your hand holds up. The break-even fold frequency for a shove with zero showdown equity is simply your risk divided by your risk plus the reward already in the middle:
That six-point drop is why antes widen your shoving range: more dead money means your all-in has to work less often. Real shoves are even better than this conservative model because you still have equity the times you get called. For a full worked example, see our guide to ante adjustments.
Notice how dramatically the colored region grows as you move the position selector from UTG toward the button and small blind. The reason is fold equity: from under the gun there are seven players left who could wake up with a calling hand, so you need a genuinely strong holding. From the button only the blinds remain, so you can shove a much wider range and still expect folds most of the time. From the small blind you're heads-up against one player with dead money already committed — the widest shoving spot of all.
Shoving is only half of push/fold. When you're in the big blind facing an all-in, you need a calling range, and it's much tighter than the shover's range because you need raw equity, not fold equity — there's no one left to fold out. Switch to the "Should the BB call?" tab, choose the shover's position and stack depth, and the grid shows the hands strong enough to call off your stack. As the shover's stack gets shorter, your calling range widens, because you're getting a better price to look them up.
These ranges are chip-EV baselines — they assume every chip is worth the same. Two real-world factors should pull you off the chart:
Reading a push/fold chart is step one. Drilling it until shoving A7o from the cutoff at 11bb feels automatic is step two.
⚡ Drill Push/Fold in the Trainer