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Tournament Strategy

Published by admin on June 10, 2025

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Playing in poker tournaments instead of cash games is much more profitable over the long-run, for a variety of reasons. First of all, there's the not-so-minor issue of the rake. While one's rewards are instant in a cash game (the chips you win represent real money) you'll pay a hard tax on every single hand that you play.

Sure, it may not seem like much on the spot, but if you add your rake up for the whole month, you'll flip your lid seeing how much money you lose on it. Remember, being successful at poker means that you have to be a long-term winner, and with the rake being a constant and long-term thorn in your side, it's going to be much more difficult to accomplish that.

Playing Tournaments with rakeback or poker bonuses

A good rakeback deal can dampen the effects of the rake, but you'll still get burnt by it in cash games. In tournaments, the rake is much less of a factor because you'll pay a one-time tax on every tournament you register for, a tax called the tournament fee. This is usually somewhere around 10% of the buy-in, and regardless of how many hands you end up playing in the tourney, you'll still only pay as much. For the same amount of rake, you can play far more hands than in a cash game.

By their nature, tournaments require a different strategic approach. While the immediate objective of winning a particular hand is always there, tournaments feature a far more distant objective as well: reaching the money or finishing as high as possible.

Based on their attitude toward this second objective, players are often categorized into 'foxes' and 'farmers'. A farmer's goal is to reach the money, a fox is after victory. Recognizing foxes and farmers will give you a clue about what general strategy these players employ.

Poker Tournament Strategies

In the opening stages of a tourney, tight play pays. The small size of the blinds in relation with future bets does say that you should indeed play tight, and the hectic action in the beginning (some people play just the opposite of what they should play) requires caution too.

Only act on good hands from late position and do avoid all-ins at all cost. As the tourney progresses, you need to gradually loosen up. This course of action is required by the escalating blinds on one hand, on the other hand, playing more hands and thus giving yourself more opportunities becomes a matter of survival sooner or later.

The middle stages of tournaments are the most delicate from a strategic perspective, at least as far as I'm concerned. This is where stealing the blinds becomes important, and this is the stage in which position gains extra importance. Coming in with a right-size raise from the button is the ideal way to steal the blinds.

Players will feel compelled to steal as many blinds as they can on one hand, on the other hand though, raising into the blinds on rags is not really recommended, because if one of them decides to defend, the whole scheme will blow up right in your face. Finding the right balance here is the real challenge.

When you are close to being “in the money”

The following critical stage in a tournament (be it MTT or STT) comes up right before the bubble bursts. This is when play tightens up in spite of the already high blinds, as people wait for others to bust out. At a time when everyone is playing on scared chips, foxes put the pedal to the metal and take advantage of the situation. Farmers withdraw into a shell at this stage, acting as punching bags for the wily foxes.

After the bubble bursts, play loosens back up again, so pay attention to that. The closing stages of any tournament (short handed and heads up) become a wild shootout where the more aggressive soon take control. The element of luck becomes a bit more prevalent here.

All the while keep an eye on your stack size in relation to the sum of the big blind and the small blind. Dan Harrington devised a system which gives players guidance based on their stack size compared to the BB+SB. The basic idea behind the Harrington system is that as pressure from the escalating blinds rises, you need to act differently. Harrington tells you the optimal strategy no matter how deep a hole you've dug yourself into.

Would you like to learn more about poker tournaments? Take a look at the Poker Tournament section at PokerPhile.

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