• The best tournament poker strategy is to recognize the three stages of any poker tournament and to have a distinct tournament poker strategy for each of the vital crunch times during a poker tournament. There are two approaches you can use when playing the early stages of a poker tournament. The first is the conservative approach.
  • Read this article before you enter any turbo or hyper-turbo online poker tournament. 2020 WSOP Main Event partypoker US Network Online Series. Home Strategy Poker Tournaments.
  • The arguments in favor of online poker being rigged would be much better classified as 'anecdotal' instead. For instance, if you go read any 'poker is rigged' thread on Reddit or a poker forum you will find that most of the comments are actually just angry, incoherent and expletive laced rants.

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Mar 17, 2008 r/poker: Shuffle up and deal! Official subreddit for all things poker. Tournament poker is all about variance. Even some of the best in the world only cash 1/10 tournaments. So keep expectations realistic. Most importantly though is to have fun, and play your game. You aren't going to get any ground breaking advice to apply with only a few days to go. So play your normal game. Live tournaments are a blast, have a.

Tournament poker is exciting enough thanks to the ever-increasing blinds and antes, and the fact the playing field is gradually being decreased to one single winner. Turbo and hyper-turbo tournaments enhance this excitement by rapidly increasing the blinds and antes.

A typical standard online tournament blind structure increases every 10-20 minutes. The actual speed depends on a number of factors including the tournament’s buy-in.

Turbo blind structures tend to increase every five or so minutes, with hyper-turbos being even crazier, raising the blinds every three-minutes or so.

READ MORE: Blink and You’ll Miss It! PokerStars Turbo Series Returns

These faster-paced structures suit recreational players down to the ground for a number of reasons. First, they don’t take as long from start to completion. Second, they level the playing field somewhat because Lady Luck has a more prominent role to play in what happens.

All tournaments are, on the surface, the same beast. Everyone starts with the same number of chips, the same percentage of the field is paid out, and the big money is usually reserved for the top three finishers. There are, however, several key differences in the strategy you need to employ to be successful in turbo and hyper-turbo tournaments. You can’t simply approach them in the same way as you would an MTT with a standard blind structure.

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Tight Is Right at the Beginning

Strategy

The early levels of any tournament are almost identical. You’ll start with a healthy stack, usually 100-250 big blinds. This means you shouldn’t be going out of your way to pick up every possible pot. Adding 75 chips to a 5,000 stack just isn’t really worth it in the long run.

Tournament

Ever heard of the saying tight is right? This is true in tournament poker where conserving chips at the start of the event is more important than accumulating them. By all means be super aggressive with your strong, made hands, but try to create a tighter image because it will come in handy later on when we start getting all-in happy!

Poker Tournament Strategy

Be aware that mistakes in faster paced tournaments are compounded and what seems like a small error can end up costing you your tournament life. Your always only going to be a few minutes away from a jump in the cost per round, so slipping up and losing 10-20% of your stack may not seem much right now, but you could find yourself short stack within a matter of minutes.

Always keep a eye on your stack size and those of your opponents. You should be doing this anyway but it’s crucial in turbos and hyper-turbos. It’s extremely easy to think you’re cruising along only for the blinds to go up and you drop below 20 big blinds. This is a tricky stack size to play and many players approach it the wrong way by still calling three-bets and making continuation bets with hands they can’t call a shove with.

Watch for which opponents have failed to adjust to their more difficult stack sizes and take advantage of them.

The Middle Stages Come Around Much Faster

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Be aware that the middle stages of the tournament come around far more quickly than in a standard structured tournament. Be prepared to start stealing more from late position and with a wider range of hands than usual to keep your head above water. A lot of turbo players continue to play too tight for too long and find themselves in the unwanted position of being in push-or-fold mode far too early,

Speaking of which, you need to master the art of short stacked poker because you’ll be playing a lot of the tournament like this! There are dozens of apps and “cheat sheets” out there that show optimal pushing and calling ranges. Memorise them. Commit them to memory, or have them on notes stuck to your monitor.

Most lesser skilled turbo players push and call too tightly. You’ll be surprised at how wide some stack sizes dictate you should be committing your stack with.

Finally, not really a strategy adjustment but be prepared for a much lower Return on Investment (ROI) when you play turbo and hyper-turbo tournaments. Your hourly rate will likely be higher but your money won per tournament much less because luck plays a larger role than your typical tournament.

Shootout tournaments involve playing several single tables – the top 3 finishers at each table moving forward to a second round and so on. These tournaments combine some sit and go strategy with multi-table tournament strategy. Since each player will take their chip count through to the next table there is no advantage to ‘folding into the money’ during the early stages. This article will look at the poker strategy adjustments required for Shootout tournaments.

Firstly we will note the prize structure implications on your strategy. Next the relation between shootout strategy and sit and go play will be noted, followed by the same comparison with multi table tournaments.

Strategy

While the payout structure, and indeed the number of ’rounds’, are affected by the number of players in each shootout – the general principle is the same. The top 3 players in each round receive a prize, which rises for each round played. The 1st round may award prizes which are little more than the initial buy-in, the second round double or triple this amount and the ending round the biggest prizes yet.

This payout has interesting implications on strategy in various scenarios. For example if you are a micro-stack at the bubble of the 1st round then folding into the lowest prize may often have a better expectation than calling a raise – for example if 2 other stacks have gone all-in ahead of you. At the same time the bigger payouts for the later rounds reward positive play to build a stack to move through the rounds with.

The existence of a bubble, where 4 players remain and only 3 go through, has similarities to a SNG tournament. With the exception of the all-in scenario already mentioned, merely surviving the bubble does not have too great an expectation. Since you will take your stack to the next round then holding just a few chips will rarely allow you to cash a second time. The bubble thus has a mixture of the desire to ‘survive’ and the need to accumulate chips. One similarity with SNG bubble play is that opponents are likely to tighten up on the bubble of a shootout tournament – a situation which you can take advantage of by raising often.

Short-handed play is not usually a characteristic of multi-table tournaments until close to the end (the final table bubble and the final table itself). In a shootout tournament you will need to adjust your play to the short-handed situation during every round of play. A knowledge of the relative strength of hands, as well as the ranges of hands which your opponents are raising (or calling raises) with, are important considerations here.

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There are poker strategy similarities with multi-table tournaments during the play of a shootout. The most notable of these is that the bigger rewards are for reaching the top 3 places of the final table. This affects your strategy in several ways, while the earlier payouts are welcome the balance should be towards reaching the big paying spots at the expense of the occasional smaller cash. The early cashes will often return your buy-in – effectively putting players on a ‘freeroll’ for the remainder of the shootout tournament.

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To summarize, Shootout tournament strategy involves understanding some concepts from SNG play and some from MTT play. SNG type strategy includes both short handed play and understanding the dynamics of the bubble. MTT strategy revolves around aiming to accumulate chips for a realistic chance of the top paying places. Good luck!