Poker Tournament Strategy

Poker tournament strategy can be divided into two main paths. A chip accumulation path or a chip preservation path. Getting to the final table means getting chips. But you can’t get chips if you do not survive. Preserving your stack can get you better opportunities later on. Thus, a combination of both ideas is important in being successful with tournaments. The problem with preserving chips is, sometimes, better opportunities do not come. Late in tournaments, when you have about 10-15 big blinds, a shift to aggression is sometimes the best thing.

With greater than a 60% chance of winning, you should be willing to put your tournament life on the line if you are getting 1:1 on your money. If you’re getting better than 1:1, your chances of winning can even be lower. Great tournament players will not risk their tournament lives early on unless they have bigger edges early on but will be content with smaller ones in the later stages.

These play like to get involved and mix it up. They show no fear. And yet, they do not get eliminated right away. What is going on? The secret is controlling the pot’s size. Calling may sometimes be the correct play in a situation that would usually call for aggression. This way, pots are kept small in uncertain situations. Top tournament players know that hold’em is a multiple street betting game. They do not shy away from these uncertain situations. They do not need to make large overbets or go all-in to avoid having to think.

So play your big edges for all they are worth. When you have a small edge and it is late in the tournament, make your move. Your results will improve and so will your return on investment. With any luck, you will match the top players who have about 100-200% ROI on multi-table tournaments. In marginal situations, control the pot size and you will start accumulating chips without risking your tournament life much. It is not one thing or the other but actually, a combination of both. Good luck and good cards!

There are lots of conflicting views when it comes to poker tournament strategy. One player says that he will never call all-in pre-flop, even with AA, if two or more players are all-in and have him covered. Another player harps on about not getting into coin flips early on in the tournament. Lots of players have lots of differing advice. Most of the time, any particular advice will only apply to a particular situation at a particular time. It is then up to you to see whether it applies to your situation also.

Poker is much more than the cards you hold. More so in tournament poker. Things to consider include blind structure, stack size, field size, and payout structure. This is what a professional thinks about. So when he is asked for a tip, remember he is considering all those factors. Your typical low buy-in tournament may not be the best to place to try out his advice!

A lot of this advice talks about avoiding marginal situations early on. This is because losing early confrontations will negate your future edges. That is assuming of course you have any. That is because most people overestimate these edges in skill. Let us assume you have AA, have only 10 big blinds left, the field is quite large and the payout is top-heavy. You are on the bubble and the average stack is about 15 big blinds. You are in the big blind and two players go all-in before you. This makes your win percentage roughly 65%. This is huge given the fact that you are getting 2: 1 on your money. You will be busted out 35% of the time, but how much can your supposed skill edge help you with 9 big blinds left after you fold? You need to have a deep stack to even consider folding. If you look at top professionals, you will find that they are much more involved than their results would make it appear.

So preserve your stack but keep in mind you are going to have to play sometime. Just keep the numbers in your head and decide when that’ll be.

A big part of any poker tournament strategy is threatening your opponent’s stack. This is usually done by putting his tournament life on the line through a pre-flop all-in. But you can’t just do it blindly all the time. There is a science to it. You can actually assign a probability to whether your opponent will fold or not.

The first thing is to assign hand distributions and calling distributions. Let us assume everyone folds to you. You are one away from the button holding 86s. You do not have any information about the players behind you, so let us assign each of them a hand distribution of [all hands]. Assuming you shove pre-flop, you think they will call with [AA-55, AK-AT].

You hold 2 cards, so 50 cards remain. There are 1,225 possible hand combinations that can be derived from these 50 cards. Now you can start figuring out your opponent’s combinations. If he has a pocket pair in the range you put him in, he can have either 6, 3, or 1 in terms of combinations depending on how many cards his pair shares with your own hole cards. In this situation, [AA-99, 77] represent 6 combinations multiplied by 6 pocket pairs for a total of 36 combinations. [88, and 66] represent 3 combinations each because you hold 1 card of each of those pairs. That comes up to a total of 6 additional combinations. [AK-AT] yields 16 combinations.

All this means that each opponent will call you with a total of 118 combinations. 1,225 – 118 = 1,107. Each opponent’s probability of folding is 1,107 / 1,225 = 0.92 which is about 90% of the time. The probably that all three will fold is defined as 0.90 x 0.90 x 0.90 which yields 72.9%.

They might fold 73% of the time give or take a few percentage points. The important thing is you know the general number and can adjust your strategy accordingly. Poker is a game of incomplete information after all so at the end of all the calculations, you just have to make the move after considering all the data.