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
When I play poker, I do very few calculations in my head.
When I play poker, I do very few calculations in my head. Instead, I have learned what to do in most every situation so it has become second nature to me. For example, say you are playing in a tournament and you flop the nut-flush draw with an overcard. Assuming the stacks are around 40 big blinds (BBs), no matter what happens, you should try to get all the money in on the flop, as you will usually have enough equity in the pot plus fold equity to make getting all-in profitable, assuming you are the aggressor. Having to add the 40-percent chance you will improve to the best hand plus the 70-percent chance your opponent will fold to your aggression, while trying to figure out his range doesn’t really do you much good. So, while you don’t have to know the exact math involved in a hand, you do need to learn the concepts that come from the math.
What to Think about in a Hand
What to Think about in a Hand One of the major differences between professionals and amateurs is how they think about a poker hand. Amateurs tend to miss most of the important details about a hand, only thinking about their two cards. One of my amateur friends talks to me about hands from time to time. He usually says something like, “I had aces and raised and my opponent went all-in, so I called and he had pocket sixes. He hit his six on the turn and I lost.” Sometimes I investigate further and find that he actually min-raised pre-flop, bet tiny on the flop, and then went all-in over his opponent’s raise on the turn when he hit the set. The way a professional would have described the same hand would have been “I min-raised aces out of my hundred-big-blind stack from early position and the button, who had more chips than me, called. The flop came J-4-2, I bet 1/3 pot and my opponent called. The turn was a 6. I bet 1/2 pot, my opponent raised to three times my bet and I went all-in. He had 6-6 and I lost.” If you don’t see the numerous mistakes my amateur friend made throughout this hand, that’s alright. By the time you finish this book, his errors will be clear.