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
As stacks get shallow, pot control becomes irrelevant.
As stacks get shallow, pot control becomes irrelevant. Suppose you have A-10 with a 25BB stack and raise from middle position. The big blind calls. If the board comes A-J-4 or 10-4-2, you should bet every time because you want to get your entire stack in. You are no longer concerned with pot control because your hand is too strong, given your stack size. As your stack shrinks, the relative value of hands like top pair goes through the roof compared to when you are deep-stacked. In general though, if you have a stack that will still be at least 25BBs after losing 25BBs in a pot, you should strongly consider pot control with top pair, weak kicker and middle pair, good kicker. Always try to leave yourself some sort of stack if you lose when you pot-control. Make it a point to only put in two bets post-flop with these types of hands, because if any more money goes into the pot, you are usually beat.
When to Slow Play
When to Slow Play Amateurs tend to slow-play when their opponent clearly has a strong hand, costing them loads of value. You should not slow-play when your opponent can improve to a hand that would beat yours, or when he could have a strong, but second-best hand.