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
One of my personal favorite
One of my personal favorite balanced deception lines to take is when I flop a set out of position against a pre-flop raiser on a coordinated board. I will check/call the flop, and then check-raise all-in on any blank turn. Sometimes even check/call both streets, which of course is extremely risky, and if both streets brick reasonably enough, over shove the river. Again, I'm only taking those lines against the better regulars. Even against average regulars, I wouldn't advocate taking those lines very often, if ever. You have to get creative though against the better regulars in your games if you want to get paid off consistently.
Putting It All Together
Putting It All Together My goal in this first volume wasn't to tell you .always do X in Y situation.. If you've played poker enough, you know this isn't going to serve you well. There are definitely some plays and lines you'd want to take more often than others, but having me, or anyone else who writes about poker, telling you static lines of thought isn't really going to cut it. Learning how to think through situations, and understand why you're taking the line you're taking, and why you've formulated plan X over plan Y is much more powerful.