Tournament Poker Strategy Articles

The GamblingSites.org poker strategy section offers in-depth strategy articles that focus on a number of different areas in the game. From live play to online play, it’s covered here. You’ll be able to learn everything from basic bankroll management to game play concepts that you can work into your existing strategy. We have prepared these articles with the goal of teaching and educating players of all experience levels, and we hope that they will improve your game and overall income from playing poker.

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Live poker is the most traditional form of the game. Whether you visit Atlantic City, Las Vegas, or somewhere in between, you’ll find that poker is one of the main attractions in every casino. Live poker offers a variety of dynamics that vary greatly from what you’ll find in typical online play. You’ll need to learn how to identity and understand live tells, what playing in a casino entails, and how to find the best game for you with the least amount of time and effort. The game may be the same in terms of rules, but it actually plays quite differently when you shift from online to live play.

Find all My Poker Coaching strategy articles in one place. From value betting and bluffing to understanding blockers and other advanced concepts! /2021/02/Satellite-Poker-Tournaments.jpg 579 1030 Ivan Potocki Ivan Potocki 2021-02-21 08:-02-21 04:58:54 Satellite Poker Tournaments Strategy – Get Ready for the Big One. If you’re not familiar with the concept of ICM as it relates to tournament poker, now is the time to start. Understanding ICM is as crucial to long-term success in poker as your ability to pick good spots to 3bet light, choose the right flops to continuation bet, or decide on a preflop shoving range. Getting through the Beginning, Middle & Late Stages. All poker tournaments have a beginning. Play The Right Starting Hands. Whether it be lack of patience, or an unfamiliarity.

Online poker is largely what enabled Texas Hold’em and other forms of poker to explode after 2003. If it wasn’t for Chris Moneymaker winning a satellite tournament on PokerStars to earn his entry into the World Series of Poker Main Event, who knows if the game would have ever become really popular. As the years progressed, online poker really began to change. At one point in time, even the weakest of players were able to generate huge amounts of profit. As players gained more experience, however, the skill levels continued to rise. Online poker isn’t what it once was in terms of playing styles, and the ability to adapt is one of the most vital skills that a player can possess.

Poker isn’t just about playing your cards; there is a lot more involved than you may realize at the surface. Some of your biggest assets as a player will come from skills that you practice when you aren’t on the felt. This could mean mathematical decisions, emotional control, financial decisions, and so on and so forth. Having a sound framework for your play is one of the easiest ways to ensure that you are creating a profitable future in the game. These articles focus on the broader areas of the game and lend themselves to a much more general approach to the game.

Games and opponents are one of many ever changing variables in poker. You won’t usually be in the same sort of game dynamics as you move from table to table and room to room. Making the necessary adjustments in your play in order to capitalize on specific circumstances is absolutely crucial if you want to be a long term winner in the game. These articles were designed with the objective of elaborating on defined situations, game types, and opponents. Use the parameters in the titles to understand how strategy varies from one situation to the next.

Tournament poker is one of the two primary forms of the game. Odds are that you were introduced to poker via tournaments in one way or another. You might have watched poker tournaments on TV, you may have played in home tournaments with friends, or you may have heard about them from others. No matter what got you involved in tourney play, you know that there’s a lot of complex strategy involved. Tournaments come in many different shapes and sizes, and being able to alter your strategy for different events is a necessity.

Sit n go poker is the abbreviated version of tournament play. You won’t be playing for hours or days on end, but you are playing with the goal of knocking out your opponents until there’s only one player left standing. As is the case with tournaments and cash games, there are many different types of sit n go’s in existence. You could play faster paced games, deep stacked games, etc. As the third most popular form of poker, sit n go’s create plenty of opportunity for profitability.

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Please let me encourage you to reach out to me with article ideas and questions for future columns. You can tweet to me at @FossilMan, or send me a message at info@fossilmanpoker.com.

I received this email recently, and thought this was a topic that many readers would relate to.

Hi Greg,

I just finished your book. I liked it! Well written. I liked the examples provided to clarify/emphasize your point. Is it better to be patient or to be aggressive to make it deep into a tournament? Which strategy will take your further?

Thanks, John

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I’m pleased you liked my book, and thank you for the kind words. Now to dig into your question. My answer, in its simplest form, is you are asking the wrong question.

You pose the question as if we are talking about a greyscale, with pure white at one end, pure black at the other, and shades of grey in-between. For your question, it presupposes that being more aggressive means being less patient, and vice versa. It is kind of like asking me if I like my Thai curry to be creamier, or spicier? You can change one without affecting the other. In poker, you can be both more patient and more aggressive, at the same time.

The real trick is figuring out when it is a good time to be more patient, in the sense of folding the current hand and waiting for something better. And figuring out when it is a good time to play the hand you are dealt, and take some risk in doing so.

Overall, whenever you choose to play a hand, it is almost always better to play the hand aggressively. One of my favorite training exercises I teach my students is the “No-Call” game. When doing this, you enter a low buy-in game, preferably a tournament, and the rule for this training exercise is you are never allowed to call. Even though there are many situations where calling is the better choice, for training purposes, you never call. The only exception is when raising is not an option.

For example, if you are heads-up and the opponent goes all-in, you are allowed to call, since raising is not an option. However, if there is a third player in the pot who also has more chips than the all-in player, raising is an option, and you must raise or fold.

This exercise teaches the student to be more aggressive, as they no longer have the passive option of calling. They can still check, fold, bet or raise. They just can’t call. Most players are surprised at the numerous times they normally would have called, now raise instead, and take down the pot immediately.

Another big factor in this exercise is that many players are much too loose, and should be playing fewer hands. This exercise forces them to fold all those mediocre and weak hands. And if not, then they must raise with those hands, and try to bluff with them!

As for patience, all the best players have it in abundance. Those who don’t are not really as good as their reputation would suggest. The only exceptions I can think of are some great short-handed players who play way too many hands in a full-ring game, but know they do so. Their solution is to only play in short-handed games. In truth, they ought to be able to become good players at a full table, but for some reason don’t have it in them to fold so often.

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For the rest of us, we do need to learn to wait and only play starting hands that are going to be +EV (positive expected value) for us to play. Another factor here is that this is not a fixed and rigid range of hands. You can correctly play many more hands from late position than early position. You can play many more hands in certain situations, such as being a big stack near the bubble. Learn all you can to recognize all the +EV spots you are dealt, play most of those aggressively, and just fold all the rest. ♠

Greg Raymer is the 2004 World Series of Poker main event champion, winner of numerous major titles, and has more than $7 million in earnings. He recently authored FossilMan’s Winning Tournament Strategies, available from D&B Publishing, Amazon, and other retailers. He is sponsored by Blue Shark Optics, YouStake, and ShareMyPair. To contact Greg please tweet @FossilMan or visit his website.