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
If you plan to re-raise, take it to around 2.75 times
If you plan to re-raise, take it to around 2.75 times the original raise. So, if someone raises to 300 at 50/100, re-raise to around 825. Add the amount of the initial raise for each player who called. So, if there is a raise to 275 and two callers, re-raise to 825 + 275 + 275 = 1,375. Add half the original raise if you are out of position, i.e., re-raise to around 3.25 times the initial raise instead of 2.75 times. If a re-raise will risk more than 30 percent of your chips, you should usually just push. Suppose you have A-K on the button with 2,700 chips, playing 50/100. If a player raises to 275 and someone calls, a normal re-raise would be to around 925. Because this is more than 30 percent of your stack, you would be better off going all-in.
The three situations above are the most standard that will come up before
The three situations above are the most standard that will come up before the flop. If you can remember a few simple formulas, you will have no problem sizing your bets optimally while providing no information on the strength of your hand. After the flop when you are deep-stacked, your bets should be somewhere between 1/2 and 3/4 of the pot. For simplicity, throughout this book, I will express bet amounts in terms of big blinds, although most poker players will express the amounts of their bets as a percentage of the pot. This will enable you to keep track of everyone’s stack size. If someone bets and you want to raise, you should usually raise to 2.5 to 3.5 times the bet.