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
I want to caution you about becoming paranoid
I want to caution you about becoming paranoid that people with optimal stack sizes will always push on you. This simply isn’t the case. Even good, aggressive players tend to have some pushing requirements. If you have never seen the two tight players in the blinds re-raise all-in, then raise their blinds relentlessly until they start playing back at you. You can raise often even with aggressive players in the blinds, because if you start playing tight, they will stop pushing on you with weak hands, which means you will never get action when you raise with a good hand. The last thing you want is to start blinding off simply because you fear someone will push you around when they have no intention of doing so.
There is a crop of players
There is a crop of players that like to re-raise small over raises that tend to be loose, even when they have a fairly small stack size, like five times their opponent’s raise. They usually believe that once they re-raise, their opponents will only go all-in with premium hands and then they can safely fold, as their hand now has little equity. For example, at 100/200, someone who has you covered raises from late position to 600 and you, with a 4,000 stack, re-raise to 1,600. The initial raiser then goes all-in, which means there will be 5,800 or so in the pot and you have to call 2,400 more, meaning you need to win only 29 percent of the time. You will find it tough to fold with such great odds, as it is difficult to be less than 30-percent against someone’s range. Also, they assume their opponents will only go all-in with premium hands, which is simply not true. One of the worst plays these people make is to re-raise with a hand like A-Q or 6-6 in this spot and then fold to a push. With these hands, you are rarely in terrible shape and usually have 50-percent equity against your opponent’s range. These players often justify their folds by saying they would be putting their tournament life at risk if they called. While this is true, any time you create a spot where you only need to win 30 percent of the time and you probably have 50-percent equity, you have a clear call, even if you are the best player in the world. The whole point of this is to make sure you don’t give yourself great odds and then fold, making a hugely –EV play.