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
Value Betting
Value Betting A value bet is made with the hope of being called, in order to extract the maximum value from your opponent’s likely worse hand. Weaker players associate a value bet with a small bet, as they think that is the only bet a weak hand will call. This is totally false. A value bet can be any size, from 1/4 pot to over 3 times the pot.
Your value bet must win 50 percent of the time
Your value bet must win 50 percent of the time against your opponent’s calling range to be profitable. In tournaments, because you can’t reload if you go broke, you should tend to avoid spots where you estimate you are good 52 percent of the time, and only value-bet when you are fairly certain you are ahead and can be called. When you value-bet, your opponent must be able to call with hands in his range that you are ahead of. You will constantly be in situations where a bet on the river is bad because your opponent’s calling range consists mostly of hands that beat you.