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
All in all, playing before the flop in deep-stacked no-limit holdem tournaments
All in all, playing before the flop in deep-stacked no-limit holdem tournaments is fun and challenging. You can play wildly from time to time, but you need to know how to be tight and wait for a hand. I will provide more details on pre-flop play in the upcoming chapters.
Which Hands to Raise
Which Hands to Raise Most poker books give a detailed chart of which hands to play. Well, I hate to break it to you, but there isn’t really any great chart to define which hands are playable before the flop if you plan on playing a relatively loose and aggressive style, as any hand can conceivably be raised from any position, especially with deep stacks. This may sound crazy, especially since I just talked about how small pre-flop mistakes can compound into huge errors, but it is true. If you know how to play well both before and after the flop, you will find that your cards don’t matter that much. However, you should tighten up before the flop as stacks get shorter because you will have fewer ways to outplay your opponents after the flop. Also, if most of your opponents are good players, you should be a little tighter than I suggest here, as you will pick up fewer pots both pre- and post-flop than from weak opponents.