Poker tournament strategy

Lot of new players play a few play money games and think they had enough practice to jump into the real money tournaments. Most of them will agree that in practice games a lot of players play for fun and not to practice or to learn. I mean they play loose, they bet without thinking and most new tables will have a flop percentage of around 90ies. And believe me most of them are not even aware of the rules or least the hand rankings.

I recommend small tournaments with small buy-ins for players who have played less than 5000 hands. Play real tight as the blinds are small and remember when you bet in poker you are basically playing for blinds. Stay with top 5–10 starting hands (See article), don’t chase and fold your hand if flop doesn’t help.

Further if you are not completely new and have some tournament experience, I recommend playing little aggressive and try to build your chip stack by outplaying loose players. You will see a lot of inexperienced players at the beginning of the tournament.

Now as the tournament progresses blinds are getting big and you will see a lot of loose players getting eliminated. Since you played tight, you will hopefully have a big enough chip count to compete against aggressive players in the middle stage of the tournament. When you have a good hand; try to knock the smaller stacks around. And risking around 10% of your chips into a tough draw against a small stack is the way to increase the chip stack.

If you have a decent chip stack then remember not to chase a hand, if the flop doesn’t help then fold and never call more than 1/4th of your chips on a draw. It’s all about surviving and accumulating chips in the middle of the tournament.

On the other hand if you are short stacked, I mean when you cannot last more than 4 or 5 rounds of blinds; You need to steal some pots by going all-in. But don’t go all-in against a very big stack where a player with higher chip stack won’t mind risking a few percentages of his/her chips to defend the steal. Always consider going all-in against smaller stacks during pre-flop or right after flop when you have any of the top 10 starting hands.

Now with good play and definitely some luck you are in the last stage of the tournament also called the money round, where things get little heavy. Here the play gets looser and as the blinds are very big, many players will not be able to see more than 1 or 2 rounds of blinds and expect them to go all-in anytime. Majority of all-ins will come during the pre-flop or the turn round. Re-raise the pre flop all-in only if you have a strong hand. Also never get in the middle of 2 players who intent to risk their chips.

As players get knocked out, the table becomes more short hand and you should loosen up more on you starting hand requirements. Now strange pairs and over-cards become really strong hands and the battle between a prepared hand and over-card drawing hand actually appears. For example AK vs JJ. Raise with confidence when you have a strong hand and steal blinds as regularly as feasible.

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