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
Out of position when your opponent is the pre-flop raiser,
Out of position when your opponent is the pre-flop raiser, you check and he continuation-bets, you should raise with very strong hands, like flushes, straights, sets and strong draws. Call with hands like top pair, middle pair, occasionally bottom pair and weaker draws like 8-7 on a 9-6-2 board. Fold whenever you miss. Again, this is a very general guideline. No guideline can make up for knowing how your opponents play. As you get better at defining each opponent’s range, you will play each hand more optimally.
Multi-way Pot Considerations
Multi-way Pot Considerations When you raise and get two or more callers, you must take care not to put too many chips in the pot post-flop with a small chance to win the hand. While you will always get better odds post-flop, made hands tend to go down in value as the action gets wild, and strong draws tend to go up in value. One of my students played a hand in which he raised Q-Q to 3BBs from middle position and both blinds called. Everyone had around 60BBs. The flop came J-10-6. The blinds checked to my student, who made a standard continuation bet of 6BBs. The player in the small blind pushed all-in after thinking for around two minutes; the big blind thought for a short while and went all-in as well. My student called, using the logic that he was getting 2.5-to-1 to call, so he didn’t need to win too often to make calling right, plus he could be ahead.