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
I expect that people generally think
I expect that people generally think I have a hand but believe I get out of line from time to time, which is true. One of my greatest skills is figuring out when my opponent is going to try to make a play on me. Once I determine this, I can play my hand in a manner that lets me catch his bluffs.
If you can cultivate a tight image
If you can cultivate a tight image while still running over the table, you should do it. This isn’t really doable in the real world. However, you can do some things to make your opponents think you are tighter than you are. First, be relatively quiet at the table. If no one hears you talk, they will tend to forget you are there. Also, if you make your decisions fairly quickly, your opponents will spend more time staring at other players, which means less time staring at you. I would also suggest not wearing too much flashy clothing. Basically, you want to blend in at the table and not be the focus of everyone’s attention. I also suggest you keep your chip stack rather small. This means not having a ton of 25 and 100 chips, which are usually obtained by winning a lot of small pots, which means you are loose. Actively make change for everyone at the table and try to keep 20 or fewer of the smaller-denomination chips.