Mar 17, 2008 Reddit Poker r/ poker. Hot New Top Rising. Won my biggest MTT last Saturday! Still riding out that high a week later. Strategy; WSOP; r/poker Rules. Late Stages Strategy for Poker Tournaments (This article is a follow up to ' Bubble Tournament Strategy ' ) The late stages of a tournament begins when the money bubble bursts, and ends when players reach the final table (or final few tables, if it is a really large tournament). So I’m just getting into online poker after playing with friends for years, and I love MTT’s and prefer to play them over cash. I just don’t think you can have a greater feeling in poker than making a deep run in a huge tourney. Anyways, onto my question. I have searched online for micro MTT strategy and I’m getting mixed results.

1. Reddit Poker Mtt Strategy Tactics
2. Reddit Poker Mtt Strategy Games
3. Reddit Poker Mtt Strategy Tactics
4. Reddit Poker Mtt Strategy Software
5. Reddit Poker Mtt Strategy Games
6. Reddit Poker Mtt Strategy Poker

Poker Tournament Tip 1: Steal a Lot, But Don’t Go Overboard “Open small and often.” This phrase drove the pre-flop strategy of almost every tournament regular for years, and it still has some merit. With antes in play, a 2.25BB open has to pick up the pot less than half of the time to show an immediate profit.

Sit and Go Poker Strategy

Although sit and go (SNG) games are relatively short, they undergo numerous stages that will modify how you should play.

With faster blinds increases than multi-table tournaments, consistently succeeding in SNG games require a very aggressive style of play. Psychologically, SNGs make people feel like they're close to the bubble right away, which means you will experience a ton of passivity and maniacal behavior.

Use your poker software to tag various opponents for their styles, there's a chance you'll run into them in future SNGs.

Stealing: Prime Times for Thievery

During the course of a sit 'n' go, you will, at a very minimum, want to win back your blinds at least once every time the button goes around the table. You have two prime moments to steal blinds when there still six or more players at the table.

1. On the button and only one or two players have called before you.
2. Your chip stack is large enough that other players would be risking losing all their chips to go against you.

Make it Easy on Yourself

If you raise against a passive player and get countered with an all-in, drop out of the hand immediately. If you get re-raised by a manic player, simply make the call and see how the cards play out. Conversely, minimize game time against other aggressive players as they're your biggest threat through the entire SNG.

Multi-Table Tournaments

During a multi-table tournament (MTT), there are three stages that should dictate how you play, and each centers around managing your bankroll or chip stack.

Early Stages

In the early stages, you will have a good number of chips compared to the blinds, but most players are simply looking to progress further into the tournament so you'll have a hard time landing large pots (unless you have a manic or two at your table). During this point in MTT play, play tight and aggressive. Fold more than you bet and bet more than you call.

Pocket pairs and suited face cards are obvious hands to play in any situation, but be prepared to shift to a more aggressive stance when you're on or just before the button.

Middle Stage

After getting through the early stages, you will find that your chips are more valuable than before as the blinds rapidly increase.

You will have to become more flexible with your hands, which goes against all human nature. What that means, though, is that other players will be getting tighter and tighter as they're just trying to make it past the bubble, so you can more often gamble to steal blinds. Don’t allow yourself to be chipped away at by blinds in the hopes to make it to the payout stages: You're going to have a much better cash out in the long run if you use the middle stages to posture for winning the tournament rather than simply earning back your buy in.

Your playable hands during the middle stage should be wider than in the early stage, and should include hands like A♥4♣, J♠Q♥, 5♦6♦ or anything better. Nevertheless, you will still only want to call all-ins when holding strong pocket pairs and high suited connectors.

Late Stage - After the Bubble

After you've busted the bubble and have made it into the payout portion of the tournament, you're in the late stages. At this point, you're going to want to pick off anyone who was just holding out and call small stack all-ins when you have merely marginal hands.

If you're risking around 10 percent of your stack or less to call an all-in and have a hand like 8♣9♣ or K♥T♠, your percentage to win pre-flop is still around the upper 40% range. If you take the short-stacked player's desperation into account, there's a strong possibility that your odds are closer to 50-50.

Unless taking a loss from one of these players will mean practically breaking you, there's not much at risk during each hand but, after knocking out a few opponents, you can quickly become the big stack at the table. However, you have to become more comfortable with gambling during the late stages; luck starts to make a bit of a difference since so many people are in a fold or all-in scenario.

On Deep-Stack Tournaments

On the other hand, deep-stack poker tournament strategy lets you gamble a bit more in the early stages of the competition. By having a larger bankroll to begin with, your chips' value is substantially less in regards to the number of blinds you can afford. However, once the blinds start to get the game to the middle and into the late stages, your strategy should simply switch over to how you normally play during MTTs.

Poker Tournament Strategy Books

To learn more about poker tournament strategy, check out these editor’s picks from top poker tournament pros:

Daniel Negreanu Power Hold'em Strategy

Gus Hansen Every Hand Revealed

Dan Harrington Harrington on Hold'em

Avoiding Passive and Manic Behavior

Two of the fastest ways to lose all your chips in a poker tournament is through making plays easily described as either passive or manic.

Passivity

Passive players will often call bets and raises and just limp into a hand by matching the big blind. They will often go all-in pre flop if they have a pair of jacks or better as they would rather scare opposition away than face a difficult decision later on.

If you find yourself going against a passive player, he or she will often fold to bets the size of the pot or larger. So, if you end up in a showdown with one of these players and hold the nuts, make your bets between 1/4 and 3/4 of the pot to keep him or her in the hand as long as possible. These players are painfully predictable, but they also make it into the money pool of multi-table tournaments quite often due to cautiousness. Still, you will likely never see a passive player make the final table in a multi-table tournament, much less win one.

Maniacal Antics

On the other hand, manic players seem to have little or no control over their betting and are so wildly unpredictable that they might as well not even look at their cards. Sometimes, you'll encounter players like this who actually believe it's a viable strategy because they once saw someone go all in on every hand during a sit 'n' go and won.

Still, most manic betters you run into will just be on tilt, probably from an unlucky string of games or they're dealing with something in real life that's too much to handle. The reality of this play style is that these players will very often be the first players knocked out of a tournament.

Playing against a manic or tilting opponent is ill advised unless you're holding a very strong hand. Their irregularity and willingness to keep a hand until they see the river in the off chance they get a backdoor straight with the 4♠6♥ they're holding.

Likewise, if you're feeling angry or particularly emotional about something in your life or you've experienced a bad run that day, stop playing and get some rest. When tilting or feeling agitated in some way, you might as well throw money away - at least you wouldn't have to deal with the inevitable that you might call a 'bad beat' but in reality was likely easily avoided.

Being Aggressive

To make the most of your of your life in online poker, you need to be as aggressive as possible while not allowing emotion to have an impact on your choices. Whether playing online, cash games, SNGs, MTTs or any combination of those, being an aggressive player is the number one determining factor on whether or not you will be a successful player.

There are two actions considered aggressive in poker: raising and folding.

As you may have surmised, there's only one other action in poker to be considered passive, and that's calling. The more often you get away from an aggressive style and call bets, the more likely your poker tournament strategy will fall flat. You'll minimize your winnings while losing more hands.

At first, being aggressive will feel like it goes against a beginner's nature as it means going against one's nature of wanting to test the waters. However, the earlier you get away from this habit, the sooner you will find yourself breaking the bubble in more multi-table tournaments and winning more SNGs.

Similarly, don't be afraid to bluff. Every once in a while, you should be betting like you have the best hand at the table even if you're holding 2♦7♥. It may cost you some chips, but if you're 'caught' bluffing, other players will be more likely to call your aggression, which will net you a larger stack in the long run.

Stay Relaxed and Focused

Being an aggressive player, though, does not mean that you have to be emotionally invested in the tournament. You have to make peace with your losses and don't get overexcited from winning large hands. Winning or losing too much can push a player to making terrible missteps during the tournament.

Try to see each movement, whether good or bad, as a mere stepping stone in a long path, otherwise you'll find yourself trying to sprint and end up broke. Breathe deep after a big hand won or lost and take another logical look at the table and your current position. Be Zen with your decisions and become a better player at all times.

Reddit Poker Mtt Strategy Tactics

Poker Tournaments vs Cash Games

Contrary to tournaments, cash games neither have increasing blinds nor do players have to be knocked out to stop playing. This allows for a more singular playing style.

Beyond this, there are other basic differences:

• Cash games usually have minimum and maximum buy-in amount, but players can choose how much to use. In MTTs and SNGs, every player pays the exact same entrance fee.
• When losing all your chips in a tournament, you're out of the game for good (in most cases). In a cash game, you can simply buy in again.
• Cash can accommodate more risk-taking styles, whereas gambling too much in tournaments can negatively affect your ROI.

Notes on Cash Game Poker Strategy

Buy in for more than the minimum. Don't start your cash game with so few chips that you're already facing an all-in or fold scenario. Try to buy in at 100 times the amount of the table's big blind. In a $1/$2 game, spend $200. In a $0.05/$0.10 table, buy in for $10.

Play tight. With blinds staying constant and having the ability to re-buy your way in, there's much less pressure for players to have the largest chip stack or make foolish risks in an attempt to double up.

You can move. If you find yourself in a bad spot like to the right of a hyper-aggressive or tilting player, simply leave the table. If there's a fish at the table that you can profit off of, just change seats and only go against the manic player when you have better positioning than him or her.

The middle stage is characterised by the decreasing relation of the stack size to the blinds and the ante. In contrast to the early stage, the game in the middle phase has much less in common with the classic cash game. The average stack is often only around 30 BBs. Decisive here is playing the right game for the various stack sizes.

Why steal the blinds?

As the size of the blinds increases, stealing them automatically becomes more interesting. This is particularly the case with the large ante at PokerStars, which is approx. 1/10 of the big blind. This substantially increases the number of chips we need per orbit (round).

• Example 1

Blinds: 100/200, no ante
Every player has to pay 300 chips in blinds per orbit.

• Example 2

Nine players, blinds: 100/200, ante: 25
Every player has to pay 525 chips in blinds and ante per orbit.

This is at the same time the number of chips already in the pot before the action has even started. By comparison with the previous example without an ante, this is an increase of around 70%! Stealing the blinds is thus much more lucrative. However, the increased bring-in is also a disadvantage because it means that we have to bring in correspondingly more chips in every orbit, which can quickly put us under pressure.
We must now adjust our strategy so that we attack the blinds more aggressively than the other players. In order to keep our stack constant we have to win the blinds and the ante only once per orbit on average. And if we manage to do it twice, we’ll win 525 chips per orbit!

Tips for stealing the blinds

The classic blind steal is a raise from the late position, best of all from the button. The position is important for two reasons: firstly, because we have position on both blinds and secondly, because there are fewer players after us who could be holding a premium hand.

If we attack the blinds with a weak hand from a middle position we have the following disadvantages.

• Players in the middle and late position can call our raise. This would lead to difficult situations on the flop because we would usually be holding a weak hand while being out of position.
• Another player could decide to re-raise. In this case we would normally have to fold our hand.

The small blind is also suitable for stealing the blinds, but we would have the decisive disadvantage of not having position post-flop. If we are the small blind and the other players have folded, we have various options:

• Fold: as a rule we should simply fold weak hands here.
• Call: we can also just complete the small blind, which makes sense particularly with marginal hands.
• Raise: with stronger hands we should usually raise. Calling with a strong hand can make sense against an aggressive opponent because we can re-raise the probable raise from the big blind.

What is important for us in the small blind is that we raise more than normal, which again is dependent on position, and that we’re only playing against the big blind. With a normal raise, the big blind would have such good pot odds that he could call with a large variety of hands; from a mathematical point of view, he would actually have to call. For this reason we should raise by least three times the big blind (in other words we should raise to 4 BBs).

• The strength of our own hand is important for a blind steal but not decisive. We can attack the blinds with a wide variety of hands, especially in late position. These include all Broadway combinations, pairs, suited connectors (also with a gap) and good suited king-queen combinations.
• Decisive for a blind steal is that no other player is in the hand ahead of us. If we are the first to enter a hand and we do so with a raise, it is known as an open raise. When another player has already called then we need a considerably stronger starting hand if we want to raise than in the situation where all the other players ahead of us have folded. This is because an open raise often wins the hand before the flop, so the strength of our own hand itself is irrelevant. However, if another player has already called, that player will generally also call a raise, and then we’re going to have to hit a strong hand on the flop. The quality of our own hand in this case is therefore more important.
• Another important aspect is the size of the blinds’ stacks, in particular that of the big blind. If one or both blinds have very small stacks, there is an increasing probability that they will very often go all-in. Big stacks defend their blinds more often because they don’t like being “pushed around”. Difficult situations can arise in both cases if we try to steal the blinds with very weak hands. Ideally, both the small blind and big blind have medium-sized stacks and are known for often surrendering their blinds.

Why raises are smaller from the middle phase onwards

In the middle phase of a tournament, players change from a normal raise size of 3 BBs plus 1 BB per limper to the slightly smaller raise size of around 2.5 BBs. At first sight this may appear pointless or at least irrelevant, because the pot is larger thanks to the addition of the ante. The idea behind this was that it would lead to bigger raises. In practice, however, exactly the opposite occurs.

Because of the high blinds and the ante, the players have stacks that, measured in BBs, are relatively small, as rule between 5 and 30 BBs. If we now raise a hand like 77 in a middle position and with a stack of 25 BBs, it makes (almost) no difference to the players after us whether we’ve raised 2.5 or 3 BBs. But if a player re-raises us, we will often be forced to fold. A raise of only 2.5 BBs would save us 0.5 BBs! The smaller our stack, the greater the effect of this 0.5 BB.

Here’s another advantage: in that we now risk fewer chips – the raise doesn’t have to be successful as often in order to be profitable.

• Example

Nine players, blinds: 500/1000, ante: 100
We’re holding 77 in the middle position.
Four folds, Hero raises to 2,500, everybody folds

In this example we win 2,400 chips from the pot. Because we bet only 2,500 chips, our raise has to win the pot straight away only once in every two attempts in order to be profitable in the long term. In those cases in which we don’t win the pot before the flop, we win additional chips after the flop if our hand improves and becomes the strongest one.

Another advantage of this minimal reduction in the raise is that if we are called, the pot is correspondingly smaller. We thus have less difficulty folding weak post-flop hands if our opponent shows strength.

It is a disadvantage that players who enter the pot after us get good pot odds. This applies particularly to the big blind. In the example above, the big blind only has to put 1,500 into a pot of 4,900, giving him worthwhile pot odds of 3.3:1.

Defending the blinds

In the above sections we have seen that we get very good pot odds, especially as the big blind, thanks to the ante and the smaller raises. In general we shouldn’t defend our big blind against raises in earlier positions when we’re holding marginal hands.

Faced with raises from middle and late positions, we should usually re-raise when we’re holding strong to very strong hands. Especially against players who often attack the blinds from late positions, we should also defend our blind with marginal hands such as 55 or [qhth]. When we do so, the important thing is to select cards that give us a chance of hitting a good flop. Hands that are easily dominated, such as low ace and king combinations, should be folded. This will enable us to avoid problems if we hit top pair without a kicker.

Reddit Poker Mtt Strategy Games

If we only called in the big blind we should very often check the flop to the pre-flop aggressor and then raise, call or fold, depending on our hand and the flop structure. An exception may arise when the flop is good for us but very draw-heavy. In this case it makes sense to bet ourselves and thus deny the pre-flop aggressor a free card.

Starting hand selection

Reddit Poker Mtt Strategy Tactics

Starting hand selection in the middle phase is quite different from that of the early phase. Because the average stack is now only around 30 BBs, the implied odds are no longer adequate for many speculative hands.

The first to lose their value are the small pairs and the suited connectors, both being dependent on high implied odds. With these hands it isn’t profitable (any more) to call raises purely on their set value or to hope that the flop will turn the connectors into a monster.

There are other ways of playing these hands. One way would be to re-raise both types of hand instead of just calling. The advantage of this is that we could win the pot before the flop. There are two reasons for this:

• our opponent has either a weak hand, or
• a fairly good hand, but one that he doesn’t want to play against an aggressive opponent because he misses the flop too often.

Reddit Poker Mtt Strategy Software

Another advantage of the pre-flop raise is that we represent a very strong hand and a continuation bet on the flop can often be sufficient to push better hands into folding.

Reddit Poker Mtt Strategy Games

It is a disadvantage that we will have built up a big pot with a weak hand, and we risk a lot of chips.

An alternative way of playing speculative hands would be to call the pre-flop aggressor when we’re in position, and not fold right away if we don’t hit our set, two pair or strong draw on the flop. On the other hand it can be enough to grasp the initiative on the flop as soon as we think we’re ahead of our opponent’s hand range.
If the flop looks as though our opponent very probably missed it, then a bluff attempt also has good chances of succeeding.

Reddit Poker Mtt Strategy Poker

However, there are certainly good arguments for simply folding speculative hands and concentrating on those hands that increase in value in the middle phase: middle to high pairs and aces with high kickers. These hands are strong enough for a pre-flop all-in, and they can also be played well post-flop if we didn’t go all-in beforehand.

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