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
Every time you make a bet when you are the favorite,
Every time you make a bet when you are the favorite, you will make money in the long run, and if you make a bet when you have a negative expectation, you will lose in the long run. When you lose when you’re all-in with A-A against 4-4, it does not mean you played the hand poorly or lost equity. In the short run, poker has huge variance, but in the long run, if you get the money in good more than you get it in bad, you will win. Variance is basically the difference between short-term results and your long-term expectation.
Now that we know every decision you make will either gain or
Now that we know every decision you make will either gain or lose money (or occasionally break even), we can decide the proper way to play most hands. But clearly, it is tough to know your equity in some situations, because to do so you need to know your opponents’ range of hands. A simple example of a situation where you are unsure how much money you lose is if you raise 7-2o in first position. You don’t know everyone’s range at the table, so all you can do is guess how much you lose on average in this situation. If you play online and use programs to track your wins and losses with each hand, you can figure out how much you lose by making any play because they will average your wins and losses and come up with a fairly precise estimate of how much you should expect to lose on average when you raise this hand from first position.