Tournament Poker 101
For most of poker‘s history, there was no tournament poker. This may come as great surprise to many current players, who may have only played tournament poker in their experience with the game.
Others, who have only seen poker on television, have been introduced to the game through tournament poker and would like to get started playing tournament poker themselves. If you are ready for tournament poker, here are a few things you need to know.
Your concern in tournaments is always the size of your chip stack relative to the blinds. As the blinds rise, the value of each individual chip decrease, since they represent a smaller portion of the blinds.
What this means is that your chips have the most value at the start of the game, so you should be reluctant to risk them in anything but the highest edge situations. As the game progresses, you need to be more liberal with your willingness to put chips in the pot.
While some players pursue a hyper aggressive strategy of trying to amass as many chips as possible,
even if that means an early bust out is likely, a proven winning strategy is the one employed by champions like T.J. Cloutier and Phil Hellmuth.
These Texas holdem tips teach a slow, steady amassing of chips, avoiding big confrontations unless you have a monster hand or it is necessary. While any small edge is good enough to put all of your chips in during a cash game, in a tournament, you need to consider that being on the wrong end of a hand could mean the end of
your tournament.
In a cash game, you can sit down or get up at any time. Tournaments require that you play until you are out of chips or have them all.
Although you can always leave your seat to go the bathroom or walk around, you cannot simply cash out and leave the game. If you play a tournament, be sure you have the time and patience to play many hours of poker.
Related posts:
- New Full Tilt Poker Tournament Format
- Protecting Your Chip Position
- Taking a Bad Beat Smoothly
- The Rockets Red Glare…or how I won a poker tournament in my poker league.
- Short Stacked Tournaments
Categories: Poker Strategy
