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Early tournament strategy

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Tuesday November, 24th 2009 by fullhouse

Tournament strategy is truly a fine art. Most forms of poker will allow players to bounce back from their mistakes, but once you misstep in a tournament there is often no going back. The nature of tournaments (unless it is a rebuy) disallows players the opportunity to correct errors that they make. If you ask any World Series of Poker champion what allowed them to win they will undoubtedly tell you that they got incredibly lucky, but what they leave out is that they made little to no mistakes the entire way through the tournament. The foundation for tournament success, be it as a whole or on a tourney by tourney basis, is found in a player’s early tournament strategy. Without a first step in the right direction you will inevitably end up lost on the path to riches. Fortunately, however, early tournament play is the easiest part of tournament play to “master.” Master might be a bit of a deceiving word as no one ever truly masters poker, but early tournament play can become a near science. What distinguishes early tournament play from the mid or late stages of a tournament? Well it is simple, the key to winning tournaments is survival, and survival is easy when your entire stack is not at risk. There are various ways to play the early stages of a tournament, some are easier than others, but the important thing to remember is that your goal is to stick around as long as possible.

How to play in the early stages of a tournament

To put it briefly, you should play tight in the early stages of a tournament. There is virtually no long term upside to risking your entire livelihood before you are even nearing the money. The problem that many players run into is deciphering what is “tight” play and what is “smart, tight” play. You will of course want to maintain your aggressiveness when playing a tournament, but you need to couple it with tight play. The combination of these two concepts will help to form what is called a TAG playing style. TAG stands for tight aggressive. For example, you will want to be raising AQ in the early stages of a tournament, but you will not want to be all in with AQ. If you had QQ, or KK, however, you might consider risking your entire stack. There is an obvious distinction between these different scenarios. While AQ might be relatively strong it is seldom going to allow a player to double up early on. QQ or KK will, however, often end up being the best hand in an all in situation. This may have been obvious to you already; this means that you are well on your way to crushing the early stages of tournament play. What do you do when you are short stacked though? Ideally you will not have a small stack near the beginning of a tournament, but if you do all that you need to do is look for a good double up spot. People will naturally call you down with weaker hands if you are short stacked, so you will be able to profitably shove with hands like AJ or AQ.