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
Most players will be somewhere between these tight and loose raise-calling ranges.
Most players will be somewhere between these tight and loose raise-calling ranges. I suggest you play with one of the numerous programs online, such as ProPokerTools.com, which I used for all the calculations above, to determine what you should do in each situation. You will find that once most players raise, you need a fairly decent hand to justify entering the pot. If you do get in with a hand that has too little equity, you will miss future opportunities when you could push much more profitably. Wait for strong hands when you’re short-stacked and someone raises in front of you.
Calling Pushes
Calling Pushes You need a fairly strong hand to call a tight player who goes all-in before the action gets to you. If he is loose, you can call with a wide range in position. The next section will be full of assumptions about your opponent’s pushing range. You must become an expert at defining opponents’ ranges if you want to become a great poker player. The best players in the world can pinpoint each opponent’s pushing range and quickly come up with a fairly accurate calling range. I suggest you find an equity calculator and follow along. If someone pushes ahead of you, you need to figure out his range and your hand’s equity against that range. The most common situation is when everyone folds to the button, who goes all-in for around 10BBs. Assume the small blind folds and the action is on you, with 50BBs in your stack. There are 2.5BBs dead from the small blind and antes, and you have to call one big blind less because you already have 1BB in the pot. So, there are 13.5BBs in the pot and you have to call 9BBs more. To figure out how often you need to win, simply compute 9/(9+13.5) = 0.4. You must win 40 percent of the time against your opponent’s range to break even. Notice that the pusher’s position only matters in helping to define his pushing range. Your position is important because if there are a lot of players left to act, you should be much tighter than if you are in the big blind with no players left to act. If you are not closing the action, you need a much stronger hand to call.