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
With less than 5 big blinds, all your options are gone.
With less than 5 big blinds, all your options are gone. It is important to reiterate that you should rarely find yourself blinding down this low. Once you get down to this desperate state, you need to look for prime steal spots or to get all-in with decent equity.
When you have 1BB,
When you have 1BB, you are looking to get all-in wherever you expect to have a little equity. Ideally, you want to get heads-up in a pot where you are getting 4-to-1 or better. Suppose you have 9-4 on the button with 1BB. If everyone folds to you at 200/400-50, there are 1,100 chips in the pot, so you need to win the hand 26 percent of the time. Hopefully you have done your homework and know that any hand will beat any other hand at least 20 percent of the time, so it will rarely be a mistake to get all-in here. Of course, the small blind will call sometimes. But sometimes he will raise, isolating you and giving you great odds against one hand.