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
The other player type will realize you are being overly loose pre-flop
The other player type will realize you are being overly loose pre-flop and will set out to take advantage of it. Against this type of player, I am much more likely to four-bet with a fairly wide range. I am also more likely to call with hands like A-Q and hope for a good flop. Suppose you are 150BBs deep again, you raise A-9 from middle position to 3BBs and your opponent re-raises on the button to 8BBs. You should either re-raise to around 23BBs or fold. Calling is out of the question because your hand has poor implied odds. If he calls your re-raise to 23BBs, you should usually continuation-bet, but realize that some players only call a four-bet with premium hands that they don’t plan to fold. With hands like small pairs and suited connectors, I will almost always call the re-raise as long as we are deep. You can fold suited connectors from time to time. You have worse implied odds against these players than against the passive ones because the aggressive player’s range is usually fairly weak, meaning he will usually only put in one more bet if he fails to improve and it appears you have a strong hand.
If you re-raise to 23BBs and your opponent goes all-in,
If you re-raise to 23BBs and your opponent goes all-in, calling with a hand like J-J or A-Q is usually a tough decision. You should four-bet to 23BBs only with hands with which you will have a simple decision. In the example above with A-9, you have an easy fold to a push. You should also four-bet Q-Q+ and A-K and be happy calling off against aggressive re-raisers.