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PokerStrategy · Joined: 10 Jul 2005 Posts: 52

Tournament strategy differs greatly compared to a live ring game structure. The most important factor when playing a tournament is: YOU HAVE TO SURVIVE ABOVE ALL ELSE!. Once your chips are gone, you are finished. You can use this to your advantage. Novice tournament player may not have this knowledge.
To play a hand based only on it's value is a mistake that many tournament players make . A good example is folding A-A in a Super Satellite when there are two or more players in preflop and if either one loses their chips, the remaining players win a seat in the big tournament.
Another factor one needs to consider is the chip status of your opponent. A player who has been stealing the blinds hand after hand at one of several short handed tables during a tournament, might want to fold a big hand against the short stack because he has a better chance to continue to increase his chips rather than combining the tables to a 9 or 10 handed game.
One other advanced strategy that the stronger tournament player understands, is the gap concept. The basic premise here is that it takes a much stronger hand to call a raise than it does to make the initial raise. It is even more important in a poker tournament because one cannot pull out more money from the pocket should he/she lose their stack (assuming a freezeout structure or after the rebuy period is over).
Poker tournaments play in a much tighter fashion. Hands that are normally playable in a looser limit ring game are death traps in a tournament. One just does not receive the correct odds to draw to a flush or straight unless they have other possible outs. For example, If one had a generic flush draw such as the Jc-10c with a board of Ad -3c -6c, it is probably not worth drawing to if one is in a heads up pot. This is especially true when in the latter stages of a tournament when an average stack might be only enough to play one and a half hands to the river. If you are going to play a flush draw you need to have two overcards to the flop, a pair and a flush draw or a flush draw and a straight draw to play.
When playing no/pot limit poker I recommend that a beginning or intermediate player only play big hands in early position as well as out of the blinds until they gain more experience. Playing this way will allow you to last long enough to observe the better players in the no/pot limit structures.
No limit poker does negate the "out of position" problem. All one has to do is scoot all of your chips into the middle when the flop comes to your liking. Although going all in does decrease your opponents skill advantage, it also increases your risk of losing your entire stack.
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