Sitting Down to Win
Here is the first of our series that will offer the poker equivalent of a sat-nav… and guide you through the heavily populated jungle that is an online multi-table tournament.
Follow these tips and you should stand a better chance of lasting through the €€€€€ Guaranteed tournaments on Sunday afternoons. Equally, feel free to ignore them. However, if you do, it is far more likely you will be dumped out early and forced to open the TV guide.
Maybe you prefer documentaries about shepherds, reality programs featuring poor people on a week-long tattoo swap, or one of those weepies where interchangeable Harrys struggle to commit to reliable Dorises before the pet poodle snuffs it at the watershed moment: Fair dos.
However, if success at tournaments is what you crave, keep with us and we will endeavor to keep you hankie-free.
Tackling the First Hour
Success at poker competitions, and arguably life, comes down to time management. Tournaments provide a ticking bomb. We’ve all seen James Bond movies where he stops a timer wired to sweaty dynamite with 007 seconds remaining whilst others have been rendered incapacitated due to the tension and the deafening mood music. Well, your task is to be licensed to kill and let the others be the ill-fated Odd-Jobs.
Luckily, most of them will be so scared of the ticking bomb that they will explode: they think that is the best way to exercise free will. So, for the first hour, play tight and watch the carnage.
The first sixty minutes usually sees half the field buy the farm. Even if you fold every hand, the relatively low blinds will still leave you with roughly 65% of your starting stack at the first break: should you double through, that tends to be enough to climb past the average stack size.
Obviously, we are not advocating sitting there idle. During the early rounds, try limping with suited connectors and middle pairs to see if you can hit the flop hard: when this happens, there will usually be a Yahoo who goes tick-tick-boom.
When you do find a monster in the hole, give some thought to your initial raise. The early stages are effectively a game of low limit so it may be worth betting 7 or 8x the big blind to a) see a bit of money in the pot and b) discourage the kind of multi-away action which sees some joker cracking your aces by playing T-4 because he used to be a trucker.
Too many players go broke during the first hour because they are tense and misfire. Relax and have a good time – you’ll end up in the top 50%. Don’t worry too much about players who have amassed a huge stack in the first hour – their dreams of megalomania are typically driven by a tyrannical desire to rule the table.
As long as you are neither shaken nor stirred, you’ll have a great chance of suavely raising your eyebrows at the climax.
Now you are ready to check out the second in our series for advice on how to remain focused during the middle part of a tournament?
