WANT TO WIN? CHANGE YOUR STRATEGY!

By Su Kim
VSP Poker Columnist

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” – Albert Einstein

Now I don’t know if Einstein was referring to tournament poker players, but he could have been. At our card room, we run tournaments twice daily and several larger buy-ins events every month or so. I see the same players showing up everyday, playing what they believe is good, patient poker, but then seeing their stack whittled away as the blinds increase. They wait for a good hand to get their money in, but ultimately, the cards don’t come and they get forced out of the tournament with a marginal hand.

As they head for the rail, you can hear the same complaints…

“I didn’t get any playable hands.”
“I was card dead.”
“That crazy guy with the big stack got so lucky.”

But sure enough, they’ll show up the next day, play the next tournament the same way and expect different results. Are they INSANE? Maybe, but they’re probably just overlooking a few important tournament truisms.

First, no one ever won a tournament waiting for good hands. Of the 169 possible hands in the deck, premium hands like AA, KK, QQ, JJ and AK only make up about 3% of the total. So guess what? In any tournament you enter, you’ll be card dead most of the time. The good news is that math doesn’t play favorites—your opponents will be card dead most of the time, too.

Second, to win a tournament, you have to accumulate all the chips and you can’t do that by folding. At some point, you have to get involved in pots and gamble a little. That’s not to say, you should be stupid and jump into multi-way pots with weak hands, but remember that crazy guy with the big stack? No one ever got lucky sitting on the sidelines.

Third, they forget that the best strategy at the poker table is to play the opposite strategy of your opponents. If your opponents are tight, you should be more active. If your opponents are crazies playing every pot, you should be more selective. In the tournaments I see, most players do just the opposite. They risk a lot early when they should be more careful and then tighten up later when they should be trying to make things happen.

So, what does this mean? In simplest terms, play tighter early on, but be more aggressive later. By tighter, I don’t mean be a nit who folds everything but the nuts. But when you’ve got 5,000 chips and the blinds are low (25/50), don’t be silly and call your stack off with 2nd pair, bad kicker, when an opponent has shown real aggression. Get involved in pots early where you can do so cheaply, but don’t risk your whole stack if it’s clear your opponent has a powerful hand.

Later in the tournament, if you’re getting short-stacked, don’t keep folding and hope aces or kings will show up and save you. Hope is not a winning strategy! Get aggressive with your stack and start moving all-in to pick up blinds and antes where you can. If you get called by a better hand, so be it. It won’t happen as often as you think and even the worst hand (32o) in the deck has a 12% chance against pocket aces and it’s got a 31% shot against a monster like AK suited.

Aggression is especially important on the bubble, that no man’s land right before the finishing places that pay money. On the bubble, when everyone’s scared of busting out and missing the money, be HYPER-aggressive. It’s not easy to make bold moves with a marginal hand like J9 or A3 when you’ve spent three hours grinding within sight of the money, but if you want to win the tournament, you MUST do it. Remember, the other players suffer the same gut wrenching feeling on the bubble, so they’re not going to call you unless they get a good hand, and even then, you’re rarely in horrible shape.

I’m not going to pollute this post with lots of math, but what I’ve described above is mathematically correct strategy in most tournaments and the one lots of tournament pros employ to build big stacks and win tournaments. And, if you’re one of the many recreational players I see playing the same weak, tight tournament game, what’s your downside? Enter a tournament and let yourself get a little crazy. There’s a pretty good chance you’ll end up like that “lucky” guy with the big stack and you might just win the tournament. In other words, if you want better results, CHANGE what you’re doing. As Einstein would say, you’d be insane not to!

See you at the final table!

Su Kim is Head of Player Relations at Club One Casino at Van Ness & Tulare in downtown Fresno. She’s an accomplished live and online player with tournament victories at Club One Casino and the Commerce Casino in Los Angeles.

Club One Casino holds daily NL poker tournaments and offers live poker games 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Call (559) 497-3000 or visit www.clubonecasino.com for details.

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