Poker Tournament Tips

Tournaments online can be some of the highest paying events in poker. There are sites that have tournaments every week that have a prize pool of over $1,000,000! Being successful in these can prove to be a very profitable situation for anyone. Take a look at poker pros Phil Hellmuth or Doyle Brunson. These players have won millions playing in poker tournaments. It’s all based on how well you do and how long you last in the tournament. This tournament strategy guide should help you to out last your opponents much longer. The strategy you use for poker tournaments online can also be applied to live poker tournaments.

Top Five Poker Tournament Tips

1. Playing Tight to Start- When you first start in a large poker tournament everyone has the same amount of chips. The players then play for a while and you notice quite a few of them have been knocked out. At the beginning of tournaments players are a lot looser than normal. They feel the desire to get a bigger stack than everyone else around them and are overly aggressive in doing so. These players tend to play far too many hands hoping to make a big hand. You will see them go crazy with draws just as much. You can take a note from poker pro Phil Ivey and pay close attention and catch one of these early lunatics to double your stack.

As long as you start out playing extremely tight in large tournaments you will do just fine. This is one thing you will notice in poker tournament strategy videos. You will be the one taking out the impatient players and you will also guarantee to move yourself closer to the payout. As long as you stay tight there are not very many situations that you can lose all of your chips and also lose your chance at winning anything.

Players have to realize while playing in a tournament your main goal is to make it into the money. Not only do you want to make it into the payout, but you want to make it deep into the payout. Playing tight helps you to get there. Keep to your standard style of play and try to pick up on different online poker tells that you notice in your opponents.

2. Understand the Luck Aspect- No matter how good of a player you are, you cannot consistently win tournaments with hundreds of players competing in it. There are a lot of times in a tournament in which you are up against another hand with a 50% chance of leaving the tournament. There is a lot of luck that comes into play in this. The player who gets the most of the coin flips will normally win regardless of skill. It is a lot harder to win a tournament than to win money in a cash game.

3. Be a Survivor- There are a lot of players who are too tight and end up losing or close to losing because of the blinds that are always increasing. You have to win enough to pay for your blinds and then more to build your stack and stay about average. Knowing this ahead of time will help you better prepare to make plays at other players after watching them for a while.

There is nothing wrong with winning some chips early, but you have to remember to hold onto them. One of the main disadvantages to tournaments is that once you lose, you are done with the tournament.

4. Change Directions- To be successful in poker tournaments you have to know how to change gears and start playing a few more hands. Players already have you pegged as a nit so you might as well open up a little bit and start taking advantage of that image that came with how you were playing. Jennifer Harman takes advantage of being a lady in poker tournaments by starting out playing very tight and seemingly scared When she changes directions she takes control of the table.

After you have been in a tournament for a while, players will start to catch onto how tight you have been playing. They will make up their mind about you reasonably quick and then follow that judgment through the rest of the tournament if you let them. This is why it is important to loosen up. These players are going to see you as a tight player and not play in many hands against you unless they have you crushed. This makes up for those times because you are taking down the blinds more frequently.

5. Open Up on the Bubble- The bubble is the point in the game where only a few people need to be knocked out before the remaining players are in the money. A lot of players tend to tighten up at this point so that they don’t risk being knocked out only inches away from being paid.

Loosening up on the bubble makes it so that you go into the later stage of the tournament with a larger stack and more of a chance to make it deeper in the tournament. Daniel Negreanu is a veteran at playing the deep stack late in tournaments. Having this larger stack is important because there will be a lot of players who are open shoving because they have so few of chips because you stole them all during the bubble.

It is important once you are beyond the bubble to also keep track of when the payout gets higher and watch if players tighten up before this. If the payout of a tournament increases from winning $30 if you go out now to $50 if you go out after 4 other players have then players might tighten up again with the bubble mind frame. It is very important to take advantage of this.
Using these tips should help anyone playing in a tournament to go farther than ever. Let the big bucks come your way now!

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