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
If you miss the turn and check,
If you miss the turn and check, your opponent will usually go all-in. You will be getting 1.8-to-1, giving you a tough decision – you are ahead of your opponent if he has a worse flush draw or a straight draw. Also, you will be unsure if an ace or king will give you the best hand. If you just go all-in on the flop, you will be applying aggression to your opponent and forcing him to make a tough decision. You must also think ahead when everyone is short-stacked. If everyone has 10-30BBs, which happens often towards the end of a tournament, any time you raise, you must think about whose all-in bets you will call and whose you will fold to. Suppose you have 6-5 with 30BBs in the cutoff. The button and big blind have 20BBs and the small blind has 10BBs. If you raise to 2.5BBs you can easily fold to the 20BB stacks and call the short stack’s push. That being said, if you raise and one of the 20BB stacks pushes, you will only need 40-percent equity to call. Because of this, you should call the 20BB pushes much more than you would think because you will have around 45-percent equity with much of your raising range. If you raise with A-J instead of 6-5, you need to be prepared to call anyone’s push, assuming the player is not too tight, in the situation above, even though you could be dominated. If you know one of the 20BB stacks to be very aggressive, you can call with much weaker hands than A-J. What you don’t want is to raise a hand like A-7 and be left getting 2-to-1. In these spots you need to win around 33 percent of the time. A-7, as bad as it is, usually wins at least 30 percent against everything, so you must seriously consider calling.
The main solution to this problem
The main solution to this problem of getting close odds is to change the size of your pre-flop raise. If you raise less, you will be getting worse odds, so you can fold. If you raise more, you will be getting better odds, so you can call. Always pay attention to the stack sizes late in a tournament and vary your bet sizes slightly, especially if your opponents are unobservant. Y ou can also just fold pre-flop. No rule says you have to raise 6-5 from the cutoff. Remember that folding is an option, especially if you expect an opponent will either push or fold before the flop.