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Opening Range

12bb CO Opening Range — Short-Stack RFI Strategy

At 12 big blinds from the CO, GTO opens about 34% of hands — a mix of min-raises (~0%) and jams (~22%) rather than a pure shove. The grid below shows the full first-in strategy.
Jam Min-raise Limp Fold Partial fill = mixed frequency

Crafty Penguin GTO solver · MTT Chip-EV · 8-handed · 12bb effective · updated Jul 28, 2026

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How to play 12bb from the CO

This is a first-in spot: everyone folds to you in the CO, and you're deciding whether to commit at 12 big blinds. The solver opens about 34% of hands here. The tighter the position, the fewer hands clear the bar to commit your stack — every hand you jam has to show a profit against the calling ranges left to act behind you.

At this depth the solver keeps a raise size in the mix, so the strongest hands don't simply jam — ATs jams about 100%. That's the key difference from a true push/fold spot: with more chips behind, min-raising lets you keep dominated hands in and play a postflop pot in position.

Read the grid left-to-right within each cell: teal is the jam frequency, amber a min-raise, blue a limp, and the dark fill is fold. A fully teal square is a pure shove; a split square is a mixed frequency the solver plays some percentage of the time. Drill the borderline hands — those are where most of the EV is won or lost.

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