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
Pretty much every poker hand you play will be fairly complex.
Pretty much every poker hand you play will be fairly complex. Simply put, you need to be thinking about your hand, your opponent’s range of hands, what your opponent thinks is your range of hands, the blinds, your chip stack, everyone else’s chip stacks, what level of the tournament you are in, your image, everyone else’s image, the prize structure, the pot odds, your expected value in the tournament, your opponent’s tells, and hiding your own tells. Some things, such as reading the board, calculating pot odds and knowing the remaining stack sizes will, and must, become second nature. Suppose you have 9-8 and the flop is 10-6-4. You should instantly see this board and know you have a gutshot and a flush draw. You should also instantly know you have around 43-percent equity against most hand ranges. Things like this will not even be addressed because they should be known like the back of your hand. If you do not know how much equity each hand type has, I suggest you spend some time playing with a poker hand equity calculator. The one I use most often is online at www.pokerstove.com.
Numerous other aspects of a hand come into play as well.
Numerous other aspects of a hand come into play as well. These will be addressed throughout this book. I will help you learn to think about all these concepts like a pro so you can play like a pro.