1. Poker Tournament Strategy Early Stages
2. Live Texas Holdem Poker Tournaments
3. Ultimate Holdem Strategy
4. Advanced Texas Hold'em Tournament Strategy

To sum it up: As a new tournament online poker player, your default strategy should be to start out with a tight poker game during the early stage and the middle stage. As the tournament progresses, you can start playing a wider range of hands, possibly even doubling your range during each progressive phase. Poker tournament strategy is usually to attack short stacks. Screw that, 3 bet bluff the bigger stacks. I find that the big stacks are just as protective as the shorter stacks, if not more. It also means you can potentially get the last bet in if they decide to 4 bet.

Unfortunately, a complete poker tournament strategy cannot realistically be broken down into just ten steps, simply because so much information goes into a complete tournament strategy. However, that doesn't mean that a top ten list can't be useful - in fact, the reality is quite the opposite.

This top ten list can be digested in a few minutes, and will transform amateur tournament players into educated players who will have a much better shot at winning a big tournament score.

Ok, enough fluff - let's get right into our top ten tips for No Limit Hold'em tournament players:

Tournament Tip #1 - Play Tight in the Early Stages

The small blinds in the early stages of poker tournaments tempt many players to play a loose game. Don’t let yourself fall into the same trap. The early stage of a poker tournament is full of loose players. All you have to do is sit tight and wait for strong hands. Besides, you don’t want to waste your chips on marginal hands early in the tournament; you’ll be needing those chips later.

Tournament Tip #2 - Increase Your Aggression as the Blinds Increase

The higher the blinds get, the more you need to steal them to stay alive. Unless you are lucky enough to win a few giant pots, you’ll spend most of your time in a tournament short stacked and worried about the next blind increase. The bigger the blinds go, the more you need to steal them.

As the bubble approaches, you should increase your aggression even more to take advantage of the players just trying to sneak in to the money. Right before the money, you’ll notice many players tighten up. They are just trying to survive long enough to make it to the money. These players represent a perfect opportunity for you to steal the blinds and pad your stack.

Tournament Tip #3 - Keep a Healthy Tournament Bankroll

If you want to minimize the chances of you ever going broke, a tournament bankroll of at least 50 buy ins is recommended. This means that if you have a $1,000 bankroll, the most expensive tournaments you should play in are $20. Tournament players have to have a huge bankroll because big wins don’t come often. The large bankroll gives you enough breathing room to survive those long draughts between wins.

Tournament Tip #4 - Drawing Hands Have Less Value

As a tournament wears on, the players will have increasingly small stacks in comparison to the blinds. Small drawing hands like suited connectors and small pairs lose value because your average opponent is so short stacked. If you spend a lot of money prospecting with such hands, you won’t get paid off with large enough pots to cover the expenses.

Tournament Tip #5 - It Requires a Stronger Hand to Call than to Go All-In

David Sklansky calls this the “Gap Concept.” The idea is that you don’t have to have as strong a hand to push all-in as you do to make a big call. When you push all-in, you have the advantage of aggression and therefore have two ways to win the pot: by having the best hand or by making your opponent fold. When you call, you can only win the pot if you have the best hand at the showdown.

Remember this tip when it gets down towards the end of a tournament and the pressure is high on everyone to collect chips. You’ll do better if you collect chips by pushing all-in rather than by making big all-in calls.

Tournament Tip #6 - Steal From the Middle-Stacks

You’ll have better luck by stealing from the players with average sized stacks than by stealing from large stacks or small stacks. The players with large stacks aren’t afraid to make those calls because they have the chips to lose. The short stacked players will call your steals out of desperation.

The players with medium stacks aren’t yet desperate enough to make wild calls but they don’t have enough chips to make loose calls. These players are the most likely to fold to your steals. Attack these players as often as you can get away with it.

Tournament Tip #7 - Improve Your End Game Skills by Playing Sit N Gos

Players who play multi-table tournaments have a tough time getting practice in end-game scenarios like the final table and heads up play. Sit N Go tournaments (SNGs) are the perfect place to practice your skills. You’ll start out in a situation similar to the final table and then get the opportunity to play in shorthanded situations as the players knock each other out. You might even win a little money while you’re at it.

Tournament Tip #8 - Take Notes

Always pay attention to your opponents and take notes. Not only will you learn useful things about their tendencies, but you’ll also keep your head in the game. Plus, you would be surprised at how often you see the same players in different tournaments. Those notes will come in handy time and again.

Tournament Tip #9 - Think About Position

Position is vital in poker tournaments because it represent a major knowledge advantage. When you act in late position, you get to see what your opponents do before you act. You can get away with playing weaker hands in late position thanks to that advantage. In early position, you need all the help you can get so you should stick with cards that are inherently strong.

Tournament Tip #10 - Play to Win

Your tournament results will vastly improve if you play to win rather than to make it to the money. For example, if you build up a decent chip stack early, don’t squander it by sitting tight and waiting for the bubble to break. Keep the pressure up and keep on building your stack.

The payouts for tournaments are heavily skewed to favor the players who reach the final table. If you play just to make it to the money, you’ll cash more often but for small amounts. If you play for the 1st place finish, you will be knocked out more often but the occasional massive score will more than make up for the times you go out early.

More General Poker Tournament Strategy:

Turbo Tournament Strategy Adjustments - How To Profit In Faster MTT Games!

by Matt

Turbo multi-table tournaments are a beast all their own. Especially if you come from a non-turbo background. Some players adjust too much, opening tons of hands at 10/20, only to realize they're busting tournaments left and right. On the other hand, you have guys like me, who sat down at his first turbo sit n go only to watch the entire game breeze by him like he was standing still.

The key is to find a sweet spot. Know when to pick up the aggression so you can build a stack and stay ahead of the blinds, and not have to resort to a push/fold strategy. We want to have a workable stack that we can use to lean on and abuse other players.

That's what I'm going to help you with now.

Key Differences Between Turbo and Non-Turbo MTTs

The first thing I want to do is point out a couple of differences between a turbo and non-turbo MTT.

• Turbo MTTs have 5 minute levels. Standard MTTs have 10-20 minute levels.
• Antes are in play a half hour into a turbo MTT. Antes are in play 1-1.5 hours into a standard MTT.
• Assuming you haven't chipped up, you'll reach a level where you have 10-15 big blinds in 30 minutes in turbo MTTs. It takes about an hour to reach that level in standard tournaments.

What you want to take away from this isn't so much that turbo MTTs are faster.

That's obvious.

What's important to understand is that mistakes in turbo MTTs compound faster. Make a mistake and you have minutes, maybe seconds before the blinds change and (effective) stack sizes and fold equity shrink. That's unlike a non-turbo tournament where you can make small mistakes and have time to correct them before the blinds go up.

So, with that in mind lets move on to some strategy.

The First Couple of Levels, Nothing is Different

Your turbo MTT strategy should be similar to your non-turbo strategy during the first couple of levels. That's to play relatively tight. The reason why is the same. You start with 100, 150 or 200 big blinds, so picking up a 30 chip pot does little to change that, much less your equity in the tournament. To put this into perspective, picking up the blinds with a 2000 stack increases your stack by 1.5%.

Whoop dee doo.

What we want to do instead is focus on building our fold equity. The image we want to project is that we're tight. We'll use our image/fold equity later on when antes kick in to (successfully) steal the blinds, or shove if we have a short stack (10-15 big blinds). So stick to the top of your range, including hands like pocket pairs, broadways, premium/suited aces, (over-limp) suited connectors, etc.

Poker Tournament Strategy Early Stages

Since you'll have some downtime during this stage, what I recommend you do is check the win / loss records of everyone at your table using services such as SharkScope or the awesome PokerProLabs - and record their stats. Pay attention to who appears to be good/bad too. All of this will help you to develop ranges for later on.

Ultimately, during the early stages you don't want to overcompensate for the faster levels. You can still widen your hand range some, compared to a non-turbo MTT or even a turbo sit n go. But your primary goal should be to create a tight image so you can use that fold equity in the levels with antes.

Planet Mark's Rec: Seeking out inexperienced opponents will make an immediate difference to your results, especially when it comes to Turbo tournaments. For this reason I strongly recommend you check out the soft tournament fields over at 888 poker. This site has many more recreational / amateur players compared to pros than sites like PokerStars. New players also get up to $88 free to try out the games (in tokens / cash buy-ins, no deposit needed) . See the visibly softer Turbo tournaments at www.888poker.com now!

Turbo Poker Tournament Strategy: Antes = Aggression

The antes in a turbo tournament will kick in about a half hour into the tournament. Assuming you haven't chipped up, your stack will be around 50 big blinds.

This is the time that you want to start picking up the aggression. The pots start to actually matter at this point because of the dead money the antes create. We're not desperate though, so you should still be selective based on position, your opponent and effective stack sizes. But go ahead and start opening a wider range of hands to steal from middle to late position. I prefer to open hands that still have some equity (potential) if I'm called. For example, I'll open Ax, Kx and even Qx suited hands, anything that might have high card / showdown value and the occasional suited connector.

Once you get a few levels (with antes) in, the pots are big enough to justify 3-betting your opponents. This is a great move to make to build your stack. If called you can just c-bet the flop and often times you'll pick up a large pot. Reshoves are very effective, too. You'll want to have your ranges dialed in, though, and I don't recommend reshoving until the pots make up 20% of your stack, or more.

Speaking of reshoves, you'll want to be aware of stack sizes to your left when you open hands. Players with 15-20 big blinds are going to look for opportunities to build their stack (or stay alive), and will shove on you with a wide range of hands, especially if you're stealing the blinds frequently. To counter this you'll want to open less, opening with hands you can call off with. But don't keep opening/folding -- that will chip away at your stack quickly.

If you're on the short side yourself (around 10-18 big blinds), don't sit on your hands. Find a good spot and shove. Waiting around does you absolutely no good. The smaller your stack the less fold equity you have. The increasing (turbo) blinds are bad enough as is. Don't make it harder for yourself.

The last thing I wanted to point out is to always check the blind levels to see when they're going up next. Sometimes you'll want to make a wider shove because the blinds are going up in 30 seconds and/or they're going up and you're going through the blinds next hand. So you'll want to shove wide to maintain your fold equity for when the blinds increase.

Late Stages - Before the Final Table (Bubble)

During the late stages your strategy is going to depend on several things. Things like your (effective) stack sizes, your position in relation to certain opponents and your stack size in relation to the other stacks. You need to pay attention to all of this. It's going to affect your opening/stealing strategy, as well as who you can lean on.

Overall, my strategy going into the later stages is the same. Reshove, steal and selectively play pots to build my stack. One thing to add to this list is isolating short stacks. That's another good way to build your stack. However, it's important to have stats/reads on these players so your ranges are close. Isolating short stacks with incorrect reads will do just as much harm as good.

Our goal at this point is to build our stack so we can lean on medium sized stacks during tense situations of the tournament, such as the money and/or final table bubble. We also don't want to get to the final table and be short and desperate. Not if we can help it, at least.

And that's my strategy for turbo MTTs. In a lot of ways it's the same as my turbo sit n go strategy, other than being a little wider/aggressive in spots. But you still want to start off tight to build fold equity, explode during the ante levels to build a stack and consistently add to your stack so you can exploit players later on. If you follow this approach closely I'm sure you'll make more than your fair share of deep runs in the turbo MTTs you play.

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Ultimate Holdem Strategy

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Advanced Texas Hold'em Tournament Strategy

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