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 generalize, the people most likely to try to outplay you are older,
To generalize, the people most likely to try to outplay you are older, non-white males and the more aggressive young kids. For some reason, old white men and tight young kids don’t try to outplay people too often. They like to play a tighter style. Also, people that fold a lot in late position when it is folded around to them tend not to try to outplay people. They don’t even try to outplay the random hands of the blinds. If you can pinpoint when someone is going to put a play on you before it happens, you will usually find yourself with a huge pile of chips.
There is much discussion over which style of play is better,
There is much discussion over which style of play is better, one where you try to play lots of small pots, called “small ball”, or one where you try to play a few large pots, called “long ball”. You have to play a decent number of pots if you want to make it in poker tournaments. Waiting for A-A, hoping to double up every time you get it, will not work in the long run.