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
Once I was nearing the final table of a $10,000 event
Once I was nearing the final table of a $10,000 event and one of my opponents, who is my friend now although he wasn’t at the time, raised with A-K. I went all-in for around 25BBs with A-Q. He folded because losing a coin flip at that stage of the tournament would be devastating. While I think he should have judged my range of hands better, as I probably had a fairly wide range in that spot because I know players fold too often, it was probably a good fold if he thought I was only pushing pairs, A-K and A-Q.
Before you get in the money, your chips will not change in value much
Before you get in the money, your chips will not change in value much because none of the money has been taken out of the prize pool. Winning a tournament has been referred to as the worst bad beat in poker because if you win a $10,000 buy-in tournament with 300 people, you will usually win around $1,000,000, not the full $3,000,000 prize pool. Because of this, before you get in the money, you should play fairly standard poker and not do anything based purely on the prize payouts.