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
Weaker players often say that if they didn’t constantly suffer bad beats,
Weaker players often say that if they didn’t constantly suffer bad beats, they would do well in tournaments. They fail to realize that everyone will lose hands as a huge favorite throughout a tournament. You have to build up a large chip stack to survive these beats and still have a chance to win. If you are blinding off and waiting for a big hand, you are setting yourself up to get all-in, which leads to going broke. If you can avoid ever being all-in throughout a tournament, it will be tough to go broke. That does not mean you should raise to 3BBs out of your 10BB stack and fold to an all-in re-raise. It means that you should keep a large stack and maintain the aggression, picking up numerous small pots while still getting large amounts of money in as a favorite.
Small ball is so effective because people fold too often.
Small ball is so effective because people fold too often. If you can make most opponents fold by raising to 2.2BBs pre-flop, and then betting 2.5BBs on most flops, by all means do it. In the high-stakes tournaments though, most players realize that when they’re getting 5-to-1 to see a flop, they should usually take it. Also, when they are getting 3-to-1 on the flop, there are huge odds to call or bluff. Because of this, the extreme version of small ball that is preached by a few of the big tournament winners does not work too well in high-stakes tournaments. I have figured out that if, instead of basically min-raising pre-flop, you raise to 2.5BBs and make reasonably-sized continuation bets, you will accomplish all the goals of small ball, while still getting some of the respect of a long-ball player.