Tournament Strategies
After receiving pocket cards, you are immediately faced with a choice: play your cards and either raise or call the blinds, or fold.
Practice Matters
Whatever you do, avoid the habit of blindly raising
Whatever you do, avoid the habit of blindly raising every time you are in late position. Players will quickly pick up on this and take advantage of you. However, attack the weakest, most passive opponents until they fight back. If you are down to about 15BBs, raising to 2.25BBs pre-flop doesn’t leave you with much of a stack. Because of this, consider just going all-in before the flop from late position with hands that don’t play well post-flop, such as A-6 and 3-3. Shove or fold with a hand like 9-8. The only hands you should consider raising to 2.25BBs are those such as A-J, 9-9 and other monsters with which you will be happy getting all-in on most flops. Also, if you raise these strong hands and get pushed on, you have an easy call, whereas you will be getting almost the right odds to call with A-6, causing you to make mistakes. Open-pushing with these weak but decent hands will save you many headaches and won’t cost you much equity in the long run. There will be much more on open-pushing in the next section.
Three-Betting All-In
Three-Betting All-In One of the most important technical skills professional players use constantly is the three-bet all-in. The power behind going all-in over an opponent’s initial raise is that he will usually have to fold a weak hand, assuming you are going all-in for enough chips to have decent fold equity. Obviously you have to pick which players you go all-in on fairly well, or you may be pushing with little or no fold equity.