Poker Classes
Tournaments
PokerStrip
POKER TOURNAMENT - EARLY STAGE
It`s early in the tournament and we are playing tight. Now this can mean a lot of different things. You hear it everywhere. Early in a tournament the correct strategy is to play tight. Now let`s examine tournament play itself and explain what playing tight early really means.
Tight play usually means something different to everybody, but generally it doesn`t mean that you should be calling much as some people tend to believe.
Playing tight early in a tournament means that you fold a lot, enter very few pots, do very few limping and only come in raising your premium hands.
You are not calling raises in middle position with pocket fours or Ace-Nine suited. You playing tight refer to not bleeding off your chips in order to save them for later when it becomes time to switch gears. So your number one job early in a tournament is to wait for premium hands and to fold all the rest. Simply by this it becomes hard to bust out early.
You are going to fold tons of hands, but you will use this early tournament stage as observation time. It is an absolute must that you use this early stage to observe as much as you can, because if you don`t it will be very hard to find answers to all the difficult questions that will pop up later.
For now, figure out who is playing loose, who is entering a lot of pots? Who seems to have developed a strong positional play? Who is limping a lot? Who is bleeding off chips playing a lot of speculative hands? You will see it sometimes that there are early all-in confrontations and a couple of times that the player with a bad hand is drawing out or really bad beating a premium holding. Make a note who is willing to go all-in with a marginal hand. In other words, it`s time to select your targets.
Your initial stack will be very deep at the early stages of a tournament, so you have plenty of time to wait and there is absolutely no reason to lose some chips doing anything stupid. Observe and see who the meekest guy on the table is instead.
Again, as we have talked of "the M" before, you have so many rounds of tournament play left that you don`t need to invest chips on anything but a premium hand.
So in deep stack tournaments you absolutely have no interest in calling with your middle hands like King-Ten or 9-8 suited, or cold calling an early raiser on the button with Ace-Ten.
Early in a tournament it is also good to find out the standard pre-flop raise size. Your standard preflop raise early in a tournament should be 3 to 5 times the big blind, the more you get the higher your initial raise has to be when you want to raise for isolation. A raise just high enough to get a maximum of two callers with a premium hand is bread and butter here.
Just to stress it again, here is why observation is key. If you have noticed that everybody is willing to lay down all but premium after several 4x Big Blind raises done by the other players, you will know the size probably without having invested one of your own chips.
Note that if you play a low stake online tournament you will face a lot of extra loose players doing some crazy poker moves and that you will sometimes have to raise 6 or 7 times the big blind if you want to thin out the field. But always keep in mind that saving chips is better than winning some small pots early in a tournament.
You are here: Poker Tournament - Early Stage
Poker Tips & Tricks