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Tournament strategy playing tournaments that are best for you

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Friday December, 4th 2009 by fullhouse

There are so many different tournaments available to online poker players that it can sometimes be a challenge deciding which ones to play. You can play anything from Razz to Hold’em, re-buys to knockouts, and deep stacks to short stacks. The variety is certainly great, but you will only be able to maximize your profits if you stick to the tournaments that best match your playing style. If you are a Razz or Stud expert it wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense to play Omaha tournaments. Novice or amateur tournament players will often get caught up in the hype of tournament variants such as re-buys. These types of tournaments can be difficult to play and require a somewhat comprehensive understanding of the dynamics of the game, but many players will sign up for them anyway. If the terminology used in the description of a tournament is foreign to you there is a good chance that you shouldn’t be playing it.

Picking your game

Picking which game to play will most likely be the easiest part of deciding which tournaments are best for you. If your prior experience is mainly in Texas Hold’em then you would of course want to play Texas Hold’em tournaments. There is nothing wrong with learning a new game via tournaments, but you should make sure that you are playing smaller buy ins in an effort to minimize your obvious risk. Stick to what you know and you should do quite well.

Tournament variants

It seems as though there are new types of tournaments being released every month these days. Tournament players can choose from all kinds of different tournament structures, be it a Sniper, Bounty, Freezeout, or some other random tournament type that you may or may not be familiar with. This diversity is certainly beneficial to the astute poker player as it will provide you with the opportunity to pick a tournament that will be most profitable for you. Not only will you be able to pick your most profitable tournament type but you might also find that it is exponentially more fun. One of the best ways to find success as a poker player is to decide what types of games are the most enjoyable to you.

Some tournament variants, most notably re-buys, require that a player have an understanding of the unique tournament structure. Re-buys can be very costly for a player who is not familiar with how they work. A Bounty tournament is another example of a tournament variant that will be most profitable only if the player understands what the Bounty aspect is all about. In Bounty tournaments players will earn money for knocking out other players, so it might change whether calling, raising, or folding would be the correct move in a certain situation.
Finding out what type of tournament is best for you simply requires a bit of research. There is no great mystery as to the variety of tournaments available or how they function. The only mystery is which one is best for you.