Poker Articles

There are different ways of going about getting paid off on your good hands at different parts of tournaments, in different types of tournaments, and versus different types of opponents. Becoming adept at recognizing these situations and the timing of these strategies is a very important part of chip accumulation, which is the essence of success in multi-table tournaments. Following are some of these concepts as I see them in the current state of online poker.

A word of warning, though: many of these strategies are very aggressive and will leave you on the rail early more times than a more solid approach will, or may simply be bleeding chips more so than you would like, but they also many times evolve into big or even huge stacks in the early to mid stages of big online MTT’s.

Early levels:

Here, one of the things I try to focus on is getting chips from the fish before they give them to someone else. These concepts apply more to large MTT’s, especially ones with many satellite entrys, such as the big Sunday tourneys or the Super tourneys on Party, etc., or any tourney where you would expect a significant amount of under-skilled players.

One way to do this, and I’ll talk about this later as well, because this strategy can work even against very good, thinking players(although not in the early levels), is to simply throw a bunch or even all of your chips in the pot preflop with your big hands (AA, KK). This is especially effective in a pot already raised from early position with one or more callers before you act. For example, EP(early position) fish raises 4x. This is more than his standard 3x raise, so we think he likes his hand. Could be AK or something like JJ+. Then we get another caller. We look down at AA and we just push or make a big overbet. Very, very often, EP fish will not be able to fold here if our read is correct (AK, JJ+). He might even call with ANY pair or AQ! Believe me, it happens all the time. Part of the reason for this, and it's not totally unfounded because you see this analysis all the time, is this mentality: Nobody is going to overbet a strong hand like we just did. If we have AA or KK, we wouldn’t play it so fast! You see this reasoning all the time, and it’s because most people won’t play AA or KK like this, which is exactly why we should, at least sometimes!  Similarly, if we are in one of the blinds with a huge hand and we have a bunch of limpers or maybe a small raise and a bunch of callers, make a BIG overbet. Many times the fish, or even a good player, will interpret this as a steal attempt, and if they have any reasonable hand, they might call.

Another similar situation is exactly as described above, with an EP fish raiser and another caller. This time we look down at a mediocre hand. If this tournament is sufficiently deep-stacked, we can call with a wide range of hands here and hope to flop something big and get all the money in on the flop, when he can't get rid of his overpair or TPTK (top pair top kicker). I wouldn’t even fault anyone for calling with any 2. Say we have 10-8 suited or 98os or 53 suited, whatever. Go ahead and make a call.

In order to make this work, though, you need to be willing to be pretty aggressive and try to get all the money in on the flop if you do hit big, giving yourself some fold-equity to go along with either your made hand equity or your draw equity. What I’m primarily thinking about is if we hit a pair with a flush or straight draw. I think we need to try to get all the chips in here, as well as the obvious times when we hit 2 pair or a set. For example, say we call with the 10-8 sooted and the flop comes 843 with 2 of our suit. EP is going to bet, probably big if he has an overpair, and then we need to overbet or push depending on the stack sizes, to try and get him committed right here. We’re only about 50/50 to win here, but if we’re going to play these types of hands when we think our opponent has a big hand preflop, we’ve got to take advantage of the pot odds and take this coin flip.

Part II, which will be posted in August, will discuss getting paid in the middle and late rounds of a multitable tournament.