Tournament Strategies
After receiving pocket cards, you are immediately faced with a choice: play your cards and either raise or call the blinds, or fold.
Practice Matters
Now of course you'd prefer to keep them in the pot when you have some equity
Now of course you'd prefer to keep them in the pot when you have some equity advantage, but having initiative in a hand is a difficult thing for most opponents to overcome. It's less difficult to overcome in limit holdem, but in no-limit when a player can make any sized bet, it's not as easy to call down versus someone's range until you know their bluffing frequencies at least a little bit. It's one thing to put an opponent on a range of hands; it's another to understand their weighted frequency distribution of each hand. That's when reads, notes, and other statistics about an opponent can help sway a fold to a call or vice versa.
That's when applied pressure pre-flop can drastically alter the dynamics of how your
That's when applied pressure pre-flop can drastically alter the dynamics of how your opponents respond to your 3-betting game. Most players still don't respond well to 3-bets, so creating a table dynamic that keeps the pressure on, builds more pots in position against your better opponents, takes initiative in the hand, creates a lower stack to pot ratio, and allows you to isolate weaker players more often can be a very profitable strategy.