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
Pot Control
Pot Control There is nothing worse than making a hand you think is strong only to find out you’re second-best, resulting in a large loss. Reverse implied odds basically mean that if you make your hand, you will either lose a large pot or win a small one. Clearly, this isn’t a good situation. Hence, you should play cautiously with hands that tend to have high reverse implied odds. These include A-9, Q-8, K-10 and J-6. If you hit top pair with these hands, it will usually be a weak top pair. When a lot of money goes into the pot, someone usually has top pair, top kicker or better. For example, if you raise A-9, someone calls in late position and the flop comes A-J-2, it looks like a great flop for you because you have top pair. But if you bet and someone raises, you are in a tough spot because, assuming you are fairly deep-stacked, he will only put more money in the pot if you’re beat.
Reverse implied odds increase as the stacks get deep.
Reverse implied odds increase as the stacks get deep. Eventually, you have to be cautious with hands like A-A because if your opponent is willing to put in 200 big blinds, he usually has you beat. Hence, you should try to check down hands with reverse implied odds. This is called pot control. Basically, you try to only put in one or two bets because if more than two bets go into the pot, your hand will tend to not be best. For example, if you raise from the button with K-10, the stacks are 150BBs and the small blind calls, you should strongly consider checking behind on K-8-2. Your hand is safe from bad turn cards other than aces, but if you bet and are check-raised, you are in a pretty rough spot. Assuming you check behind the flop, you should call whatever your opponent bets on basically any turn and river.