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
One of the most profitable situations in poker
One of the most profitable situations in poker comes up when you have a significantly shorter stack than everyone else at your table. Say you have 20BBs on the button and everyone else has 100BBs. They will tend to either ignore or forget about you and play as if everyone has 100BBs. Actually, if the player with 20BBs isn’t that good, they should ignore him, as he will not play optimally anyway. But, if they know the person with 20BBs is very capable of going all-in with a wide range, they should tighten up a little so they can be happy calling the short stack’s shove a decent amount of the time. When you are the short stack, you will constantly see your opponents raising hands like 8-7o, A-4o and J-8s. Because of this, you can push a very wide range over these raises when your hand tends to be better than their very wide range. Later in a tournament, when the average stack is 20BBs, everyone will play much more snugly and you will not have nearly as many great re-stealing opportunities. When you get short early in a tournament, do not give up. You are usually in one of the most profitable situations in poker.
For simplicity, for the remainder of this site,
For simplicity, for the remainder of this site, when I mention a stack size, unless I mention otherwise, it will be the effective stack size.