Tournaments Guide To Winning Poker Tournaments
A lot of poker players think that to win money or online poker tournaments you have to try and chip up as early as possible.
Others insist that to win poker tourneys it’s essential to play passive early in order to let the donks play their crazy games and knock themselves out during the first few blinds.
I am not sure that either of these strategies are correct or incorrect but neither works well for me. In this article I will outline what does work for me and hope it helps you win more at the poker tournament tables.
I do agree with both of the earlier mentioned strategies insofar that the early stages of a tournament are very important in the grand scheme of things. What I do not like is that neither strategy works consistently.
Both early chip out and passive start approaches can be seriously affected by local conditions such as the player mix and the simple fall of the cards. I try and play a more measure pace somewhere in the middle of the 2 schools of thought.
My experience is that early on it’s best to play fairly tight, only play the best 10-15 hands and pocket pairs, but when you have them play them aggressively. Build the pot early and take it down when you know you have the edge.
All other hands should be thrown away pre-flop and forgotten. Yes, forget them, the reason being that if you fold a marginal hand that you would normally like to play in a tournament such as 6h7h and the flop is 345 rainbow you’ll start to tilt very quickly and start throwing chips away.
Later in a tournament you’ll want to play these hands as over the course of a long tournament suited connectors will be your biggest money makers. For now, however, you need to play safe and stay in the game while other people are throwing chips away and being eliminated.
You should also try and maintain a decent size stack relative to the other players and not get too far behind or our final table hopes will be dashed ahead of the bubble. How you maintain this optimum stack size is actually relatively easy, especially in online play. We are going to play tight-aggressive-aggressive and monitor the biggest stack, smallest stack, number of players in the tournament and the average stack size.
What we want to do before the first bubble is simply stay alive to make it into the cash. The best way to do this is to watch these things rather closely and, by playing your hands properly, keep your stack at or a little above the average.
I’ve had people tell me that this won’t work since you can’t make the final table this way. Untrue! If you’re stack is always at the average you are always in the top 50% of the remaining player in the tournament, this means that when the final table begins you are sitting in 4th or 5th place and poised to take the bigger stacks. I play this plan in both live and online play and it works rather well for me.
Play following the bubble is slightly different as you still want to maintain that average+ stack but by now the average class of players you’re up against will have gone up too. Now it’s time to open up your hand selection a little bit. If you can get in cheap, say 1-2 BBs, you now need to play any top 20-25 hands as well as any suited connectors from any position, off suit connectors can now be played from late position as well.
Remember that when I say connectors I mean cards that actually connect, i.e., 6h,7c are connectors while 6h,8c would not be, lots of people get confused by this saying that these cards do connect and while they can connect to create a straight you’re now drawing inside and hurting your chances. You have far better odds of making that straight with 6,7 than you do of getting it with 6,8.
I hope this helps you with your poker tourney play, if you’re a newcomer to poker tournaments then I advise you to learn poker with no risk of cash loss at some of the poker rooms that have free money bonuses listed below:
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