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
Your chips constantly change in value.
Your chips constantly change in value. If you are running low on chips, you need to get your last few chips in the pot with a decent amount of equity. If you have a huge amount of chips, they lose value because a person can only go all-in for the amount of chips they have in front of them. Those extra chips above what the 2nd highest person at your table has are not worth nearly as much as the chips that equal that player’s stack.
Suppose you are down to nine players in a tournament
Suppose you are down to nine players in a tournament and everyone has 100 chips except you, with 100,000 chips. First place pays $100, 2nd pays $70, 3rd pays $50, 4th pays $30, and the rest of the spots pay $10, for a total prize pool of $100 + $70 + $50 + $30 + (5)($10) = $300. In this extreme situation, your 100,000 chips will almost certainly win you the tournament, but you don’t need nearly that many to win. By the same note, all the players with 100 chips have a huge amount of equity compared to the large stack. In fact, one of the 100-chip stacks will end up having almost the same value as the 100,000-chip stack by the end of the tournament, as the large stack will get $100 and a stack of 100 will get $70. Consider the prize money that will go to first place versus that going to everyone else in proportion to their stacks. The 100,000-chip stack will win $100, so each of his chips is worth $100/100,000 = $.001, whereas the chips of the other eight players are worth ($300 - $100)/9 = $0.22 each. As you can see, once you have a huge stack compared to everyone else, those extra chips greatly diminish in value.