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
Simply put, figure out your opponent’s range,
Simply put, figure out your opponent’s range, determine your odds, figure out which hands to call with, and then cut the worst hands out of your calling range because of players left to act in the hand and your value in the tournament if you fold.
When Someone Pushes over Your Raise
When Someone Pushes over Your Raise This section will address the situation when you should call a push after you’ve raised to 2.25BBs out of your stack of 15 or more BBs. The astute reader could probably come up with all the formulas to figure out your calling range against a short stack’s shove once you open. Think about it and try to figure it out. Learning to think for yourself is important because no one is there to help you at the table. Suppose you raise any two cards to 2.25BBs out of your 30BB stack and a player pushes for 10BBs. Everyone folds back to you. You first need to figure out your opponent’s pushing range. This varies by player type, and also by his opinion of you and your raising range. He will probably push tight if you’ve raised tight, and shove a decently wide range if you’ve been loose. I will give a few examples based on your opponent’s pushing range, and also a few random hands with which you may open-raise. There are 16BBs in the pot when it gets back to you. You have to call 8 more, giving you 2-to-1 odds, so you need to win 33 percent of the time to break even. Note that you will usually be getting much worse odds if there are no antes. Antes basically force you to call because you are getting such great odds, as we will soon see.