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
From middle position with 15BBs, you should usually push all hands
From middle position with 15BBs, you should usually push all hands you are going to play because most opponents will assume you have a weaker range when you raise from middle or late position, meaning they will play back at you more. Go all-in with all but your strongest hands to ensure that your opponents never outplay you. You can raise to 2.25BBs with your strongest hands, such as 10-10+ and A-Q+. If your opponents just call, it isn’t the end of the world because these hands play so well post-flop, and you can easily get all-in if they push. If you raise A-K or 10-10 to 2.25BBs, someone just calls and the flop comes J-5-3, you have to call if he pushes into you because you will be ahead of his range despite the poor flop. If he checks, you should usually just go all-in because locking up a 7BB pot is never a bad thing when you only have 15BBs. Push weaker hands, such as 2-2+, A-8+, K-10+, Q-10+, J-10+ and all suited connectors. Also push random good, suited hands like J-8 and 10-8 from time to time. Again, this may seem like a wide range but it will win a lot of chips. If you are playing against strong opponents that will realize your small raises mean you have a strong hand, simply push your entire range instead of raising your premium hands to 2.25BBs.
With a 10BB stack in middle position,
With a 10BB stack in middle position, push an even wider range. Hopefully, you are seeing a pattern by now. As your stack gets shorter and your position gets better, you should push a wider range of hands. From this position, I would push something like 2-2+, A-6+, K-9+, Q-9+, J-9+, 10-9, suited connectors and any two suited cards higher than 8.