How to Play a Great Poker Tournament

Just imagine for a second what it would be like to have a squeaky clean slate, free of all the frowned upon casino psychological tactics. Imagine if you could bring yourself to Gone with a very small investment, have a great starting bank and start earning for the day. I say bring yourself to the casino but bring yourself to the pokerrepublik table. In fact, that’s what you need to do today.

This article isn’t about tips or tricks for playing perfect poker. Rather, it’s about the statistics of the game, and why playing loose or tight may be the most lucrative play.

Situation #1: You have a ten-goal Game

Nine out of ten goal-setting sessions are lost. We all have around nine-hundred hours on our hands. Most of us won’t be able to play around ten-games in tournament play.

However, realise that you can always drop down to a freeroll tournament and play three to four hours for a cheap buy-in. This allows you to register and play in multiple SNGs and use them as many times as you wish.

Once you have mastered the MTT game, with its small fields and focus on tight, successful tournament play, you will be able to handle situation where you have nothing more than ace high or something like that.

Then all you have to do is wait for a good hand and move all in.

Opportunity #2:Middle Stage Strategy

Most of the advice you will read from the pros will tell you to tighten up your play at this stage, while a majority of the players eligible for the tournament will play exceedingly loose.

While you don’t want to completely fall behind in the tournament, you don’t want to take a major hit for the tournament at this point. If you can, try to within a few hands of the cutoff or in the money. The real reason to be playing tightly at this point is because the blinds will have risen to a large portion of your stack.

However, there is also a large amount of un-tapped potential as there are twice as many players who are short stacked as there are at full wealth.

Opportunity #3:Late Stage Strategy

If you have made it all the way to the late stage of the event, your goal isocrue of the top 4 places. Top 3 places are the average finish for highly skilled MTT players. If you played as well as you can in the early stages, you should have built a hefty stack to take into the late stage.

Most players online will play 80-100% of their hands, which effectively makes them lose money in the long run while you only have a few big events under your belt. In these 10-30% of hands you will have to be extremely aggressive, and lucky if you win more than you lose. Play an aggressive game, take chumps, and go all-in with 4 high cards.

Sidence #4:When to go all-in

Bluffs can be very effective at times, but you don’t want to be predictable in big pots. If the board is paired and chances are there are more than 2 other players in the hand, you should feel confident about going all-in.

Late stage is where you won’t be able to take full advantage of your strong hands. If you have less than 15% of your stack in a pot, you’re making a good decision to wait for a stronger hand. Maintaining a strong position with good cards is the key to winning tournaments. When you’re worries are numbered, you’ll have less chips to fight another player. When you’re depending on luck, you’ll be closer to 50% or more of the time in a 10-30% probability range. The M and L stacks will come into play frequently, but your big hands will win ten-out-of-10 pots more than they lose. Play your small and medium hands aggressively, but smartly. With a good hand, you’ll either be able to take or win the pot. With less than a premium hand, you should either be all-in or be out of the tournament.

Sidence #5:Online Stack Sizes

A mistake many online players make is they never give themselves enough consideration when it comes to the stack sizes of the players they face off against. Some players are so short-stacked that reaching the bubble is a question of when rather than if. Others have the super-short stacks that it is not even worth contesting the blinds with them. When you can buy into a tournament with a stack size of 20xBB, depending on the cost of moving to the event, you should be able to buy-in with 10BBs (10xBB for the cheap seats).