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The Functions of Chips in a Poker Tournament: Preflop Utility Functions

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We can loosely categorize the usefulness of our chips in three separate divisions: preflop utility, post-flop/turn utility, and river utility, all of which are important functions.

1. Chips can be used to steal blinds and antes.
With a moderate to bigchip stack, you can do this in any unraised pot from any late position seat. With a really big chip stack, you can frequently steal blinds and antes from early and middle position seats. Likewise, with a big chip stack, you can frequently steal pots from preflop limpers simply by raising. The bigger your chip stack, the more ruthless and aggressive you can be on these preflop steals. With a small stack, you may be able to go after the blinds from the button or cutoff seat, but you must play more cautiously because any play back at you may cost you more chips than you can afford to lose. In other words, a player with a big stack can make these types of position plays with just about any two cards, because it's cheap to get away from the hand if the steal attempt fails.

Poker Tournaments Tips

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Here are dozen of the useful tournament poker tips:

Play in lots of online tournaments, especially Sit ’n’ Gos. You know in advance how much you can lose, so they provide a wonderful opportunity to play lots of poker hands and practise your skills at length with the absolute minimum of risk.
Although it’s correct to play aggressively towards the end of a tournament, never risk your whole stack unless you are an overwhelming favourite to win. For example, it’s quite wrong to go all-in with a pair (other than Aces or Kings) before the flop. The chances of someone calling you with one or two overcards, and then hitting a pair by the river are far too great.
In the early stages of online Sit ’n’ Go No-Limit Hold’em tournaments, go all-in before the flop with pocket Aces or Kings. The odds are very high that you will get a caller with a weaker hand, and double up your stack.

The Rules of Good Basic Strategy for Low Limit Holdem

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There are almost as many strategies for playing Texas Hold’em as there are books about the game itself. One thing is clear, however; low limit Texas Hold’em is a vastly different game than the no limit version you see on television. Low limit is even different than high limit, because there tends to be many, many more bad players at low limit Hold’em. Let’s face it, it’s much easier for most players to make a dumb call for $4 than for $200.

Some of the information contained in this article differs somewhat from conventional Hold’em wisdom. But a low-limit game filled with a lot of bad players is a different game than a higher-limit game with better players who understand the game, and there’s no disputing that. If you are playing against one such player, you will normally kick his can all over the place. But when five or six players are all doing the same thing every hand, one of them will invariably draw out on you much of the time.

Open Limping

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To open limp means you are the first to voluntary enter a hand preflop and do so by simply calling the big blind instead of raising. Among good cash game players, this is a bit of a faux pas. The normal recommendation is to raise when you are the first to enter a pot. There are good reasons for this. You give yourself the chance to simply take the blind money. And, while NLHE is a big bet game, do not underestimate the value of winning lots of small pots.

Yet another benefit of opening for a raise is it increases your steal equity postflop. You gain what players call "the initiative" in the hand. This means players are responding to you. You're controlling the hand and dictating the action.

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Small Ball Poker

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Most good tournament players believe that the ideal strategy is only to play a big pot when having much the best of it. The strategy of keeping pots small until a player has the nuts, or close to it, is known as small ball. Small-ball tactics work best when blinds are small compared to stack size (if the cost of the blinds, or blinds plus antes, per round is less than 10% of the average player’s stack, it’s small-ball time). In the latter stages of a tournament when blinds and antes become a significant portion of players’ stacks, small ball becomes a less significant factor. While small ball is a general concept, it means different things to different types of players.

Old-school players employ small ball as a method of extracting chips through pot-size manipulation. They use opening bets and raises to narrow the possible range of hands their opponents could have. Then, based on those determinations, they proceed accordingly. Their goal is to build their stack gradually through repeated small bets at favorable odds. At the earliest limits, their main chance to get a big stack is through trapping an opponent in a big pot when they have the nuts. For the most part, however, they view the early limits of a tournament as something to get through with their bankrolls intact. Small ball is a means to increase their chances of survival.

LAG Play in PLO: Playing After the Flop

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Post-flop play is essentially identical regardless of preflop playing approach; the only real difference between post-flop play using a LAG-heavy pre-flop playing approach (opening fire on the blinds, attacking limpers in position, and 3-betting in position) vs. a small ball-heavy approach (flat-calling and limping more often in position and playing a pot-control game) is that you will be playing with the preflop initiative more often when you take a more LAG-heavy approach. This, in turn, means that you will probably be checking behind more often when taking a LAG-heavy approach than a small ball-heavy approach.

Here’s the basic situation: You open with a raise before the flop from the button, and only the big blind calls. The stack to pot ratio (SPR) > 8, so this is a deep-stack scenario where there are three legitimate bets left to play.

At this point, there are two basic possibilities on the flop: Your opponent will either (a) Check, or (b) Bet.

Playing the river in short-handed PLO

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Despite all these “representing more strength than you actually have” tactics, sometimes your flop or turn bets will get called, and you reach the river with a hand that is not as strong as you had portrayed it to be. Many weak players would bet big in this spot with their bad hands or missed draws to represent a monster, and to make the opponent lay down the better hand. With their mediocre made hands like two pair, they would tend to check to induce a bluff bet from an opponent who might have a busted draw.

With a busted draw or weak hand
Assuming I have been lead-betting all the way, and the possible draws don’t seem to have gotten there, I am not that fond of the “betting big” option that many players will use. “Why is that?” you may ask. Well, it’s because in this situation, these same players will often bet much less or try to sell their hand if they really have a big hand, while betting big if they are bluffing. For that reason, I like to turn this pattern around, especially against players who expect you to bluff big if you miss yet milk a little if you really have a hand. To them, a small, even-sized bet of about one-quarter or one-third of the pot will often look like a milking bet: many good players would fold their one-pair and even two-pair holdings in that spot, not wanting to reward your obvious value bet. So, against players like this, a relatively small bet may get almost as many folds as a big bet would - with this difference, that you now lose a lot less money if your bluff attempt fails. However, you don’t want to bet too small, as your opponent may be induced to start bluff-raising you, or just get curious to see what you have now that calling is so cheap.

Blind Stealing in Online Poker

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Stealing is a very basic way to improve our winrate, and utilize our positional advantage to the fullest. Stealing is very beneficial because we give ourselves the chance of picking up the blinds preflop, and also being in position in the event that we are called. If we can focus on picking good spots to put free money in our pockets, we can effectively freeroll bigger pots later down the line.

The big question to ask ourselves is “who are we stealing against?” Let’s take this spot where we have T6s on the button. It folds to us and it is our option. If we look to our left, we might consider stealing if the players are tight and fold a lot. So if we have a 13/10 (VPIP/PFR) and a 11/6 (VPIP/PFR) in the blinds, there is a good chance we can steal here. We also want to check some other things:

Check-Raising in Pot Limit Omaha

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As a general rule, giving free cards is a big no-no in PLO. As such, you should tend to bet your own hands and employ the check-raise sparingly, particularly in multi-way pots. However, in short-handed pots - and especially in heads-up pots - there are more good opportunities to check-raise as a bluff or semi-bluff, simply because it is far more likely that your opponents will bet light in a short-handed pot than a multi-way pot. That said, check-raises tend to fall into one of two basic categories:

Standard (planned)
Non-Standard (improvised)

Standard (Planned)

A standard (planned) check-raise is when you check with the intention of raising. Because we are not in the practice of giving free cards, this means that you must have some reason to expect someone else to bet: that reason is usually because there was a raise before the flop.

In fact, raised pots account for the vast majority of check-raising opportunities in PLO.

Short Handed Online Poker

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In short handed no limit hold’em, the pots can get big in a hurry. All it takes is a pot size preflop raise and call, a two-thirds pot CB and a call on the flop and there’s a serious chunk of chips in play. If you’re involved in these situations, it will be either as the bettor or the caller, and as you know, “It’s better the bettor to be”. To make sure that you’re driving most of the hands you’re involved in, loosen up your raising requirements and, at the same time, tighten up your calling requirements. This will ensure that, on balance, if you’re in the pot, you got there first and you got there biggest.
Let me not mince words: It’s bad to be just calling. You surrender initiative. You’re back on your heels. That’s a bad place to be with inferior cards, though not so bad if your hand is strong. Therefore, let the quality of your cards make up the loss of command in the hand. In other words, it’s okay not to be driving if you’ve got hidden strength. It’s a disaster not to be driving and also not to have good cards.
This boils down, weirdly, to a “passive/aggressive” strategy for short handed no limit play. You’re passive about getting involved when someone else wants you to, but extremely aggressive about inviting them to tangle with you.

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Poker Strategies

Standard (Planned)