Tournament Strategy – Stealing the blinds
Posted on October 18, 2009 in Poker TipsAfter the early stages of any big poker tournament, when the play, and the players, have settled down somewhat, begins the long, tedious and drawn out process of crawling your way to the money.
The bigger the field the longer this middle period will be.
By this stage many of the lesser skilled players will have been eliminated. Of course some of them will have doubled or tripled up.
But the majority of the field now will be playing in a style similar to your own, that is, in a potentially winning strategy.
What you need to do right now is play only the premium hands that come to you. This will be quite boring of course, but you can spend you time studying your opponents.
Bearing in mind that any decent player will be doing exactly the same, you will need to switch your play up a bit. One approach here is to play uber tight in early position, playing super strong with only premium hands, but to loosen up completely when in later position.
When in position against a small early raise you will want to smooth call with the nuts, but come over the top with half your stack with any lesser hand.
That is a fairly simplified appraoch, and you will need to fill it out a bit by using what you have learned in your down time against your opponents when you can. Also, don’t stick too rigidly with this as it will be soon spotted by an experienced tourney player, who will take you out by simply small raising something like pocket aces.
This is a nice strategy for stealing the blinds but getting a decent amount of chips instead of just the blinds.
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