In a tournament it can be 50 players and it can be 500 or more. And obviously your goal cannot be to always win, but to be “in the money”. That means reaching a placing that is inside the pricelist.
One of the big factors in tournament play is luck! You need more luck than in a sit n go game. That’s because of the multitude of players and the many all in situations that you must survive.
Okay, so you need luck, but which are the specific tournaments skills you need? You got to be aware of the structure that you are playing. Like in a sit n go game the blinds are raised in time intervals and this is affecting the nature of the game. In tournaments the blinds will eventually get tremendous high and when this happens it’s very much about defending and stealing blinds.
Don’t be too obstinate about defending your blinds, you must have hole cards that are meaningful to defend with. It’s usually better to steal. Because when you do this it’s you who are the active part and it’s you who decide when, which let you do it in favourable terms. It’s thus a big difference to go all in and to call an all in. When you decide to raise big or going all in by this action you can win without contest. An aggressive move can also give your hole cards a shimmer that often surpass reality.
Playing the conditions
A big tournament is sometimes almost a mayhem in two ways (here I according to a standard noticeable on Internet, not professional conditions). One we have discussed: the tendency of numerous all in. The second “absurdity” is shown especially in the beginning. Players who usually play quite ordinary poker will become loose-aggressive players with kamikaze instincts. This is a psychologically thing that has brought them to the conclusion that it’s all or nothing. If you got lucky with the cards in these sequences you can be more profitable than in most other Texas hold’em forms.
The fact is that many players have a special (sort of understandable though) attitude in tournament play. They think: “I have already put in 300 of my 1 000 chips in this pot, what’s the use continuing with 700 chips against hundred and more players owning 1 000 chips? I will lose in about an hour and that’s just waste of time – let’s go all in and hope for the best…” As you understand you have chances to collect a lot of chips in the early stages of a tournament.
Many players play on a rush in the opening stages because they think that if you don’t double up fast, there’s no idea to go on. If you follow this attitude you must rely on the luck. I hope you have learned by now that the luck wins once and the skill wins twice. So what you shall do is to wait for good hands and then win big pots against the rushing players.
“The bubble”
If you have succeeded to be left in a tournament when the majority has left the building you are closing in on the prices. Let’s say it was 200 players from the start and 40 gets “in the money” and now it’s 60 left. In this case you are near “the bubble”. The bubble is in this case the place 41 and the situation that occurs now is like, metaphoric speaking, when you been on the sea for a long time and you finally can see land. It’s just 20 paddles to make before you’re among these price placing. So how are you going to act now? As gentle as you can to not letting anything go wrong? No, if the water is calm upset it!
The reason for this is that when you approaching the price places, many players get cautious because they don’t want to risk leaving so close to the prices. Consequently you are in a profitable situation. If you are an ambitious player you strive for more than a 37th place and the entry fee back, you are going for bigger awards. And if this is true about you, in the long run you will gain more by utilize the bubble situation.
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