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
After this hand, the loose player started raising
After this hand, the loose player started raising around 75 percent of hands before the flop. He somehow won every showdown and built his stack to around 200BBs. I was pretty confident that if I re-raised him again, he would probably not fold. About 90 minutes later, he raised to 2.5BBs and I re-raised with A-J to 8BBs out of my 70BB stack from the small blind. He instantly went all-in. I called fairly quickly and won a 140BB pot against his A-6. Even though I had not played a hand with him in 90 minutes, I could feel he was going to go after me whenever he had a chance. As long as you are one step ahead of your opponent, poker will be a profitable game for you.
How Much to Bet
How Much to Bet I always size my bets and raises the same so my opponents cannot get a read on the strength of my hand from them. The following set of numbers is going to be rather boring, but necessary to remember, as you will need to know how much to raise to for each stack size. Obviously all the numbers listed apply to when you plan to play your hand. If you are going to fold, simply fold. If any bet will risk more than 30 percent of your chips, you should usually go-all in unless you have a good reason not to. There will be more on this throughout the book.