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
Watch what others are doing
Watch what others are doing and always make an effort to figure out why they are functioning the way they are. Keeping your mind thinking about reasons behind actions will help you recognize when similar situations arise in the future. Work on reading body language. Not a ton of work has been done in this area for poker, but there are a few books on the subject. In general though, if you pay attention and put A + B above together, you'll learn to form your own conclusions about body language and how it relates to tells at the poker table. Work on increasing your memory. Since you'll be paying attention more, and forming more conclusions about your experience, you're going to want a good memory bank to pull from and access that information. Learn to trust your intuition and what how your body reacts to situations it encounters. This is sometimes called "trusting your gut." There's some truth in the expression since your stomach or heart tend to be organs that you can sense and feel more readily when you're reading a situation and using your intuition to influence your decision-making process.
Keeping your attention at the tables
Keeping your attention at the tables by making good notes will lead to good reads and increase your perceptiveness against your opponents. Learning to blend and use your rational mind to understand hand ranges and math, and trusting your intuition, will become a deadly combination.