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
Pot-Control Medium-Strength Hands
Pot-Control Medium-Strength Hands Pot-controlling with your medium strength hands becomes mandatory as your stack diminishes. You can ignore pot control from time to time for balancing purposes with a deep stack, but maximizing your chance of survival becomes important as you get shorter. When you flop a hand like top pair, bad kicker, or an underpair to the highest card on the board, you are either way ahead or way behind. It is tough in this situation to get much money in throughout the hand as a big favorite. Suppose you raise K-10 to 2.5BBs out of your 70BB stack from middle position and the small blind calls. The flop comes 10-8-2.
Your opponent checks and you bet 4BBs.
Your opponent checks and you bet 4BBs. Your opponent calls. If the turn is anything besides a king or a 10, you should check against all but the most passive calling stations. Call any river bet, and value-bet if your opponent checks, unless the board came off with a combination of two overcards that don’t give you two pair. Playing the hand this way makes it tough to risk more than 20BBs, which is good because you are probably beat if much more than that goes into the pot. Use your best judgment if your opponent raises you on the flop. Whatever you do, don’t act like you are weak because when you call his raise, you want to get to showdown as cheaply as possible. Tend to call against loose-aggressive players and fold to tighter players.