Early Tournament Poker Strategy

Early Tournament Poker Strategy

The early stages of a poker tournament are the building blocks for your deep tournament runs. As important as early play is in a tournament, it is not all that hard to understand. When you are in the early stages of a poker tournament your goal should be to slowly build a stack with as little risk as possible. There are many players who think that you have to play extremely aggressively in the early stages of a tournament, but this couldn’t be further from the truth.

Most players who go crazy trying to build a stack will bust out pretty early in the tournament. You can’t win a poker tournament if you aren’t in it, but this is something that many players seem to neglect. Hanging around is one part of early tournament play, the other part is building a stack. You have to do both of these things in order to get anywhere.

Early tournament play is a situation where one skill is almost useless without the other. Anyone could hang around in a tournament, but they would inevitably go broke once the blinds ate up enough of their stack. It would be a terrible strategy to just sit around, you would outlast some players but you would never get anywhere.

Building a stack isn’t necessarily a big task. If you open shoved with any two cards you would eventually win a monster pot, the problem is that you would lose many big pots in the process. What you have to do is carefully pick your spots. This is how you combine the two different skills required for success in the early stages of a tournament play, carefully select your spots, but be aggressive when you are involved.

Picking Your Spots – Early Poker Tournament Strategy

Picking the correct time to get involved is the key to dominating the early stages of any tournament. Proper hand selection will go a long way towards picking solid spots to get involved. If you know what types of hands you are looking to play it will be easy to wait until you get dealt one of those hands.

There will be spots where you will need to expand your range a bit, but if you adherer to some general guidelines you will experience sustained success. The type of tournament is going to determine what kind of hands you should be playing. For example, you will be playing different hands in a super turbo 6-Max tournament than you would be in a deep stack regular tournament.

It is all but impossible to pre determine the exact hands you are going to play, but you can estimate your range in order to make your decisions easier when you are actually playing the tournament.

Experience is the only way that you can come up with solid ranges, if you take shots in the dark it will be hard to compete with the other players who really know what they are doing. It isn’t hard to pick the right spots to get involved, it just takes a little bit of practice.

SUMMARY: Poker Tournament Strategy 101

The early stages of a tournament are easy to play. Any player who is willing to break down the two vital areas of early tournament play will be able to dominate tournaments as they advance into the later stages of play.