Are you looking to jump start your tournament poker career, but aren’t quite sure how to get started? We’ve all been there, and there is no shame in needing some help. In fact, all the best players started somewhere, and they all got plenty of help along the way.
We have compiled a list of a few very useful poker strategy tips that pertain to tournament poker exclusively. Check these out and start building your tournament poker strategy on these fundamentals.
#1 – Master Short Stack Play
Most poker tournaments start with relatively deep stacks. But, before you know it, everyone is left playing with 10, 20, or 30 big blinds, with only the chip leaders sitting on a deep stack.
For this reason, being a master of short stack strategy is essential for any would-be tournament crusher out there.
The first step to this is memorizing the tournament push/fold charts, which allow you to make profitable shoves and calls on stacks of 15 big blinds or less.
These charts allow you to play in an unexploitable way and always go all-in with hands that make a profit, regardless of your opponents’ responses.
Of course, playing a short stack is not all about shoving or folding, as elite players find many other strategies to optimize their short stack play.
Even with fewer than 20 big blinds, there is plenty of room to min-raise, call min-raises in position, or defend your big blind with a reasonably wide range.
Being efficient with a short stack will significantly improve your overall tournament poker results, as it will come in handy in almost every game you play.
#2 – Be Smart with Game Selection
While tournament poker players don’t get to do as much game selecting as cash game players can, you still get to choose which tournaments to play and which ones to skip. You can also join the newest online casinos or poker sites to find more recreational players.
For one, you should only play tournaments within your bankroll. Always try to play games you can afford to play, as playing beyond your means will cause you to play poorly while encountering tougher competition at the same time.
If you play online tournaments, you should be able to carefully choose which games to play, and which ones to skip.
Do your best to detect who the regulars are in the tournaments you play, and avoid playing in small-field games populated by mostly pros.
Instead, look for bigger field events with many recreational poker players, where your skill edge will significantly boost your expected ROI.
If you play live poker, your options may be more limited, but you would still be wise to try and figure out which tournaments offer actual value, and which ones pit you against players of similar skill level where your edge is minimized.
#3 – Build Huge Stacks with Well-Times Aggression
Every good poker strategy revolves around aggression. Whether you play in cash games or tournaments, being aggressive at the right times will help you win more.
Aggression is especially important in tournament poker, as it allows you to put pressure on players in a way that’s not possible in cash games.
While players can easily simply re-buy if they lose their chips in a cash game, losing chips in a tournament can mean the end of the line for a player.
This makes aggression especially important when playing against recreational poker players, on the money and final table bubble, and in other key moments in a poker tournament.
One of the best tournament poker strategy tips we can give you is to look for situations when the risk of losing is the highest, and apply maximum aggression and pressure on your opponents in such situations.
#4 – Beware of Stack Sizes at All Times
Whenever you talk to a professional poker player and you ask a question like: “How should I play pocket Aces,” they will ask you more questions before giving you an answers.
One of the key questions they will ask will have to do with stack sizes, as they impact the best way to play different hands greatly.
Always being aware of your own chip stack in relation to the blinds, as well as all other chip stacks at the table, is the only way to build a successful tournament poker strategy.
Many poker players forget to adjust for other players’ stacks, which leads to quite a few uncomfortable situations.
For example, you can’t open a wide range of hands, regardless of your chip stack, if there are multiple players left to act who have a short stack.
Since these players will often shove over your raise, your range should consist mostly of hands that can call off their shoves in a situation like this.
While playing a tournament, always keep scanning the stacks, know who the short stacks and the big stacks are, and adjust your strategy accordingly.
#5 – Defend Your Big Blind Often
If you watch a lot of poker tournaments on TV, you have probably noticed that the elite level players defend their big blind a lot.
There are some very good reasons to do so, and they mainly have to do with pot odds and the common raise sizes used in tournament poker.
For example, imagine you are playing in a poker tournament and you find yourself in the big blind. The blinds are 100/200, with a 200 big blind ante, and everyone folds to the cutoff, who raises to 500.
There is now 1,000 chips in the pot, and you are being asked to call 300 more to potentially win a pot of 1,300. A quick pot odds calculation will tell you that you need less than 25% equity to make the call here.
Against a cutoff raising range, almost any hand you can have, and certainly every suited hand, will have 25% equity. This means you could theoretically all with your entire range.
Of course, it is worth noting that some hands, like T3 offsuit, perform exceptionally poorly postflop, and being out of position will mean you won’t get to realize your full equity.
All that said, you should be defending your big blind a lot against min-raises and other small raises, and only fold the absolute bottom of your range in most situations.
#6 – 3-Bet a Lot When Stacks Are Deep
Playing with deep stacks isn’t too common in poker tournaments, but it does happen, especially in the early stages of tournaments.
When stacks are deep, poker solvers tell us that we can play similarly to a cash game. This means we get to 3-bet a lot, especially in position.
At shallower stacks, best tournament strategy recommends 3-betting a polar range, made up of the strongest hands and bluffs like A2s-A5s, K9s, and 87s.
This is mostly due to the fact we don’t want to 3-bet a hand like AJ and get 4-bet shoved on. When we do, we are forced to fold a hand that has a lot of equity against our opponent’s range.
On the other hand, this is not a factor to consider when playing with 80 big blinds or more, which is why we can 3-bet a lot more value hands at a much higher frequency.
Hands like KQs, KJs, KTs, and other similar holdings become reasonable 3-betting candidates, much like they would be in a cash game.
Keep in mind that you should still be calling with a lot of pocket pairs and suited connectors as well, thanks to the great pot odds you get in most tournament situations.
#7 – Understand ROI and Expected Win Rates
Another common misconception in tournament poker has to do with win-rates and tracking results. Tournament poker is incredibly volatile, and poker players often get confused about their actual expectations.
The only way to track results in tournament poker is through a metric called ROI (return of investment), and only over a large sample of games.
If a player sits down to play five tournaments, and ends up winning one of them, they may think tournament poker is the easiest thing in the world.
However, such a player would be in for a rude awakening, as they could easily go on a massive losing streak where they don’t make the money, let alone win, for dozens of games.
To have a good idea of your ROI, you should play a lot of tournaments, keep track of all your buyins and payouts, and calculate ROI on as big a sample as possible.
Once you have played hundreds of live tournaments, or thousands of online ones, you will have a good idea of your actual ROI and your expected win-rate.
#8 – Don’t Worry About GTO Too Much
GTO poker is all the rage these days, and all the cool kids are playing it, but the truth is you don’t need to play perfect GTO to beat low stakes tournaments.
While you will definitely want to do some solver work and practice playing poker in a GTO style, there is no reason not to play exploitatively against the very weak opponents you will encounter in low-stakes games.
As you work your way up the stakes, you should keep exploiting the massive blunders made by your opponents as long as you can. Once you reach a level where most players are fundamentally sound, you will already be playing some pretty high-stakes.
Don’t focus too much on making the play that a solver would, and instead make sure to make the play that prints money against the opponents you are up against, and not in a vacuum.
#9 – Learn How to Adjust to ICM Implications
Unlike in cash games, tournament poker chips don’t hold the same value throughout the tournament. A single chip is worth a lot more early in the game than it is later, and this phenomenon is explained by the mathematical concept known as independent chip model (ICM).
Understanding ICM is an important part of modern tournament poker strategy, but unfortunately this isn’t something you can learn in ten minutes and always have perfect understanding of.
Instead, ICM is only learned through practice. Special ICM tools like ICMizer exist to help you practice your ICM play and make better decisions in game.
One of the key things players forget is that ICM kicks into play earlier than you might expect, forcing you to play tighter ranges even well before the money bubble.
For the most part, ICM considerations have to do with how wide you can call shoves on certain stack depths and at certain moments in a tournament.
Before you get comfortable with ICM, just keep in mind that the deeper you are in a tournament, and the closer you are to the big payouts, the more reluctant you should be to put your stack at risk.
This is especially the case if you are a middling stack and there are multiple other players with smaller stacks who are likely to bust before if you simply let go of your marginal holdings.
#10 – Become a Competent Heads Up Player
Heads up poker may be a separate game from tournament poker, but if you want to be a successful tournament player, you will need to learn how to play 1-on-1 at least somewhat well.
It is true that you will rarely get to play heads up in poker tournaments, but the times you do, you will be playing for a lot of money.
The pay jump from second to first is always the biggest in the entire tournament, and it can often be truly dramatic. While some players may choose to deal with you, others will refuse, and you will be forced to play heads up for a ton of buyins.
It is for this reason that you want to be a competent heads up player, which allows you to hold your own when it matters the most.
Most opponents you will play with in tournaments won’t be incredible heads up players either, so as long as you have a grasp of some basic heads up strategy, you should do well enough.
Of course, if you want to become a truly elite tournament player, you will need to practice heads up play often, so that you can actually crush your opponents when the tournament is down to just two players.
