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 raise from late position
If you raise from late position with a 30BB stack and someone in the blinds calls, you should usually make a standard continuation bet. Fold if you have nothing and your opponent plays back at you, and be willing to get all-in with something like top pair and a good kicker. It is important to make these steals against players who will fold. If a tight player that hasn’t entered a pot in four orbits raises from first position, you should never re-raise. On the other hand, you could consider calling with a hand like a suited connector and hope for a favorable flop. Suppose you have 32BBs and a tight player raises from first position. If you are in late position with suited connectors, then strongly consider calling. Pay constant attention to everyone’s image and adjust accordingly.
Which Hands to Raise
Which Hands to Raise Once your stack gets down to 40 big blinds, you must start tightening up when raising with weak hands from early and middle position because you lose too much of your stack when your pre-flop steals fail. You must also drastically adjust your late-position range, depending on the type of opponents left to act behind you. If the players are weak and tight, you should raise basically every time you are folded to in late position, but if they are aggressive and constantly re-raising, then play only hands you would at least consider getting all-in with. Playing optimally with 27 to 40BBs requires a great read on the players and the knowledge to play a technically sound game of poker. You know that your implied odds decrease along with your stack size. You can no longer raise hands like small pairs and suited connectors from early position once you get down to around 40BBs. You raise suited connectors from early position primarily to balance your range. The need for this pre-flop deception goes out the window once you’re short-stacked, because at this point, poker is played mostly before and on the flop. This means you should play hands that have the chance to make top pair.