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
Playing the River
Playing the River The river is an interesting street because if you can accurately narrow your opponent’s range down to a few hands, you can figure out whether or not you are going to win the pot. While you can rarely narrow his range to one specific hand, you can usually put him on a fairly tight range. Be careful when doing this against great opponents, as they will use deception throughout a hand to try to confuse you, causing you to make mistakes. I will give you some solid guidelines in the next few chapters to help you avoid being swept away by the river.
Calling when You Think you are Beat
Calling when You Think you are Beat The pot will usually be fairly large by the time you get to the river, and you will generally be getting at least some sort of odds to call. You should often call if the pot odds exceed the odds that you have the best hand, even if you will lose most of the time. Be more prone to fold once these calls start taking up a lot of your stack, as you don’t want to risk your tournament life by calling off in a spot where you are getting good enough odds to break even. As with any decisions in tournament poker, breaking even is not good enough. You need an edge.