Poker Tournament Strategy Tips: Early to Final Table Play

Instead of playing defensively, you should be playing solid and aggressive poker early on in order to build up a stack for a deep run. Players don’t check with hands that can call multiple bets as often as they should. This means that, when they do check, they usually have a relatively weak hand that will often fold if faced with multiple bets. This is the “bluffing with nothing” situation I alluded to earlier.

• At around 15bb’s or so, most of your 3bet resteals will be all-in shoves.
• If you lose all your poker chips, you’re eliminated from the poker tournament.
• Tilt occurs when emotional stress clouds your judgment, and you start to make bad decisions at the table.
• If you can make it a habit to identify where the money will come from before committing to a table, you can drastically affect your edge and increase your chances of winning.

Key Terminology For New Poker Players

Here’s an example of a situation where you may want to apply this principle in a counter intuitive spot. To make a decision based on your “tournament life value” (TLV), you need to factor in these variables to make the best decision, using all the information available to you. The looser he opens, and the tighter he calls your shove, the more you can justify stealing wide. Conversely, the tighter no account casino he opens, and the looser he calls, the more conservative you’ll have to be when considering a shove.

However, it’s important to remember that exploitative play and exploitable play are two sides of the same coin. In other words, when you adjust your strategy to exploit your opponents, you become more exploitable. No two tournament players are alike, so it’s up to you to identify and attack a specific player’s weaknesses. See this article for 8 common exploits that work against weak competition. Pushing every worthwhile edge will help you build big stacks and set yourself up for deep runs.

Customize your game based on stack size.

Most professional players will make better mathematical decisions and analysis, severely mitigating the aspect of luck. Success at poker heavily relies on your bankroll management. Most poker players put aside a small amount that is used for poker.

As we’ve seen, getting a feel for the table dynamics involves not just monitoring your own stack, but the other players’ stacks too. All part of the challenge of becoming a successful MTT player. Naturally, if you’re in an early position there are more opponents left to act behind you. This increases the likelihood someone could be dealt a really strong hand. These winning players aren’t using some secret formula, just consistently taking the right approach and making good decisions.

This is called over-limping, and it can be a good play because you are getting great pot odds to join the action so you can hit something good on the flop, hopefully. Once you move up in stakes, you can start applying some advanced poker strategy and master the more complicated areas of the game. If you want to learn the game on a deeper level, the quickest way to do that would be either hiring a poker coach or signing up on a poker training site. To decide which training site you should choose, just read our review of the best poker training sites here.