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
To determine which hands are best for isolating,
To determine which hands are best for isolating, think about the short stack’s pushing range, which will usually be fairly wide, and determine how your hand performs against that range. Since you should already know how to figure this out, I will be brief. If the short stack pushes from the button for 5BBs and you and the player behind you both have 50BBs in the small and big blinds, respectively, re-raise to 9BBs with every hand you plan to play. You need to figure out what odds you need in order to determine with which hands you can call. There are 7BBs in the pot and you have to call 4.5BBs more, so you need to win 40 percent of the time. If the short stack pushes 80 percent of hands from the button, re-raise to 9BBs with all except your worst hands, hoping the big blind folds. I would cut hands like 10-4 or J-2 from my range because you can find better spots. Also, once the table sees you isolate with a total junk hand, you will have to be careful about doing it in the future because they will be quick to play back at you.
If your opponent goes all-in
If your opponent goes all-in for something like 10BBs, you can now call with weak hands and monsters. You should still isolate with medium-strength hands. You call with weak hands so you can get away if a player pushes behind you. You call with monsters to balance your calling range. You will also set some nice traps from time to time. Re-raise your medium-strength hands because you don’t want players coming along with random hands, and you might occasionally re-raise them off a better hand. You should generally min-re-raise if you have at least 4 times the initial push, and push if your stack is smaller than that.