The art of online tourney Part 1: The early stages By: PokerDan
Like many other people around the world, I enjoy playing tournaments online. The amount of the buy in can be very reasonable, ranging from a few dollars to a few hundred and the reward great. The prize pools, even for small 10 dollar buy in tournaments often reach up to 5-10 thousand dollars. These tournaments are full of dead money, people that have no chance in the world of winning these tournaments.
They may know starting hand strategies, but generally are not good poker thinkers and get themselves into big pots early without the goods. These people are what makes these tournaments so juicy. Let us first discuss some general starting requirements. If we assume the buyin is 10-30 dollars, there will be some good players but many reckless players. The correct strategy in the early going in these tournaments is to play very tight. The suited connectors that I often play go down in value with low blinds because the reward for bluffing or stealing a pot is not worth the risk. Generally you want to be folding in the early stages. You might even want to fold baby pairs like 22-55 in early position. The Raising hands should, at least for the first few levels be only AA, AK, QQ, and possibly JJ. The rest of the pocket pairs and perhaps big aces can be limped with, but folded to any raise. Basically my philosophy, stolen from a friend who has become very successful at NL tourneys is that you can be willing to get all your money in preflop in the first hour with only QQ-AA, and AK, and the others just aren?t worth it. Let us take a quick example.Let?s say you are in 3rd position with 9/9 and you have 1455 of 1500 chips after 1 round of blinds at 15/30. The first 2 players fold and you limp. All fold to the button ,who raises to 150. Now as we discussed the correct play here is to fold. Why? Well do you want to gamble here? Let?s look further into this. You are out of position and the raiser gets to act after you on every street. If you reraise and he calls, there is almost no way you are ahead, because you will either be in a coin flip or a 4.5-1 dog against a big pair. The goal early in tournaments is to survive. You fold here. The key to early parts of a tournament are to wait for good hands. You limp with pairs and try to flop a set, or you simply fold and wait until the blinds get bigger. It simply is not right to risk your chips early with so much play due to the low blind to stack ration. Doing this will set up back a few chips, but when the blinds get bigger, then your strategy starts to change. The few chips you might blind off here are not important, and can easily be recouped later. This may lead you to throw away the best hand now and then, but that is something you must do if you want to be a good player.
So, to review, in the early stages of an online tournament, you must live by one saying. ?Tight is Right.?
