Some Thoughts on No Limit Holdem Tournaments
June 12, 2008 – 4:21 pmNo limit holdem tournaments have become very popular. Many poker players are starting to give the tournament format a try. Let’s look at some ideas to help with tournament play.
You must have some flexibility in your game to succeed in tournaments. Adjusting to how your opponents are playing is very important. Also, the situations change as the tournament wears on and players are eliminated.
In the early stage of a tournament, everyone is somewhat deep stacked. This is when you can play “poker”. Later, when the blinds get huge in relation to players stack sizes, it becomes more of an all in pre flop type game.
When everyone has a lot of chips compared to the blinds, you can use hands like small pocket pairs or suited connectors to hit big hands, cracking the big pairs. When you have big pairs you need to be careful. If you don’t improve these hands you can get in trouble.
If you have big blinds relative to the stack sizes, this turns thing around. You have to be careful not to waste chips chasing hands with weak cards. But, when you get a big pair you need to play it hard.
This is what most players new to no limit holdem tournament do wrong. They don’t adjust their play to the stack sizes in relation to the blinds, especially their own stack. They play the cards only.
With the blinds big, it becomes essential to steal them as much as possible. When you look to steal, you need to sense what your opponents will be thinking. The size of their stacks controls a great deal of how the will play. Here’s a case in point.
You have 8,000 chips and are sitting on the button with the action folded to you. The tournament is nearing the bubble, where you start to make money. The blinds are 500/1000 with antes of 100. The small blind has a stack of 70,000 chips, and the big blind has 100,000.
In this situation the two players in the blinds can risk calling you with a lot of hands. So, you would want to have a strong hand to play. The strength of these two players stacks forces you to wait for a good hand.
If the small blind has 10,000 chips, and the big blind 13,000, things are very different. These two will fold unless they have big hands, so you can go all in with a much weaker hand and be confident to steal the blinds most of the time.
So as you can see, it’s more than just your hole cards. If you want to be a winning tournament player, you need to consider many factors before making your moves. These pointers should help you do this better.
Tags: Games
Related Posts
Print This Article :