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
Think about a few things before making this play.
Think about a few things before making this play. First, you need a tight early-position image. If you have raised from early position in each of the last few orbits, a bluff is unlikely to work. If you have not raised from early position in a long time, feel free to raise with a wide range. I usually raise with 4-4+, A-J+, K-Q and J-10s+ from early position all the time. I widen this to include hands like 9-7o, 2-2, A-3, and 4-3s when I am bluffing. Try to raise into blinds that are fairly tight. Raising with a weak hand doesn’t do you much good if there is a loose calling station in the big blind. You should usually fold to a re-raise. Your opponents will put you on a tight range, so a player willing to re-raise must have a strong hand. If you are deep-stacked, go ahead and take a flop with hands like 3-3 and 9-8s, as you can win a big pot on a good flop. Fold every time with hands with reverse implied odds, like A-J and K-Q. Despite having a bunch of players behind you, when used sparingly, this play will work a huge percentage of the time, usually taking down the blinds.
Being Pot-Committed
Being Pot-Committed The idea of being pot-committed is interesting because if you think ahead, you should rarely have the right odds to call. As we learned earlier, if you are the last person putting in the bet with a draw, you will never be in a tricky spot because you know you always have some fold equity. As stacks get shorter, don’t pot-commit yourself before the flop with decently strong, but not monster hands. Suppose someone raises from middle position to 2.5BBs and you have A-J with a 40BB stack. You could either re-raise to around 7BBs or call. Before you re-raise to 7BBs, you must decide what you will do if your opponent pushes. Most of the time you’ll be getting 2-to-1, or will be in a spot where you expect to have around 35-percent equity, in which case you should just call. In fact, unless you are trying to gamble to get a more playable stack, you should seldom re-raise with this stack size because if you get pushed on, you will usually be getting the correct odds to make a break-even call. Only consider a re-raise if you have a strong hand or are re-raising a loose raiser.