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
Secondly you want to make sure you have a poker goal
Secondly you want to make sure you have a poker goal in mind. Goals and motivations can easily get blurred, and with many people they can sometimes even conflict. A goal can of course change over time, but knowing what your initial goal(s) are can quickly let you know how in alignment they are with your motivations. If your motivation is to play for vacation money, but your goal is to win a WSOP bracelet, it's going to be rough going to take small winnings and purchase high stakes tournament buy-ins. Not that you can't satellite in for cheaper, but the motivation and goal won't be in complete alignment and you'll mostly working against yourself. Just make sure you're clear in your own mind.
Once you understand your motivations and goals
Once you understand your motivations and goals then you can begin to make a plan for how to achieve your goals. If you've noticed your motivation isn't completely in alignment with your goal(s), then be honest with yourself about what you think you need to change. Set realistic achievable goals to begin with, and then expand those goals into bigger goals as you achieve each goal. It's great to have a goal of becoming the best poker player in the world, but don't make that your first primary goal. Set something realistic like .win my first 5k online.. Then once you reach that, and have some taste of success, expand that to win 20k, and/or win a $20 buy-in tournament.