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
Some opponents will only call with 10 percent of hands,
Some opponents will only call with 10 percent of hands, in which case your equity when called dips to around 32 percent, so you have 0.9(3) + 0.1[32(0.32)-15] = 2.2BBs, which is huge. Push everything from the small blind unless your opponent is willing to call off very wide. As your stack dips to 6BBs in the small blind, you should still push with every hand. Even though you will be called much more often, you will still show a significant profit. Suppose you push all your hands and your opponent calls half the time. We have 0.5(3) + .5[12(0.42) - 6] = 1.02BBs.
It is tough to not profit by pushing all hands from late position
It is tough to not profit by pushing all hands from late position as your stack gets short. But don’t get too far out of line from early position when you have 15BBs, as that can cause some costly mistakes. When I played sitngos as an 18-year-old, I would constantly push A-x from early position for 10BBs. Once some of the powerful online poker tools came out, I realized the size of that leak and quickly fixed it. From early position, you need to be tighter as long as you have a decent stack of 10BBs or so, and you can shove wide as you get short. When it is folded to you in late position, and especially the button and small blind, shove any two cards as long as your opponents are not calling with an extraordinarily wide range.