Improve Your Tournament Play

Improve Your Tournament Play
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  • PG News February 5, 2011
  • 3 Minutes Read

So you lost a big hand at poker games online that knocked you out of a tournament, and now you are looking over the hand history to see if you made a mistake. That is a great way to better your game. However, it is not clearly recognizable what aspect of your game you should be improving. Some may be more sorely needed than others. Given the assumption that you haven’t really made money in tournaments yet, here are a few poker strategy skills to work on immediately.

Understanding odds

This concerns the mathematical part of the game, and in tournaments it is not just odds, it is also implied odds that you need to understand. You could be playing the same hand, but with different odds scenarios your decision to play the hand or not, can be at opposite ends.

Hole card strength and dominated hands

Determining the EV of particular hands, and understanding the deep cost of dominated hands can instantly boost your success rate significantly in online poker tourneys. Hole card strength is often described by an EV rating or a group hand ranking in poker calculators. Surprisingly, most of those rankings are in the negative and that should tell you something right away. In addition, hands that look strong – for example KQs are often dominated to a pre-flop raiser, and can result in huge pots with you on the losing end.

Figuring your M and tournaments stage

There is an essential principle called M or mzone which if you know at any given time in the tournament, you can fundamentally alter your strategy. It takes a little math and a little know-how, and a lot of courage at times to know what the right move is. However, once you understand this mathematical principle of the game, you may very well be a force at the table, any poker tournament schedule! Another important factor is how the prize money will be distributed, often resulting in a wide spectrum of betting tactics. Ordinarily once you’re in the money for example, you may want to change gears and decide to shoot for the final table where the real profit is.

The value of profiling players

It is an indispensable aspect of poker even at the lower limits because all of your opponents tend to fall into predictable profile conventions. Understanding what these characteristics are will assist you in making more and more accurate decisions when playing against them. If you have no reads or thoughts on what type of player you are playing against, your decision will be more complex than it should be.

Getting a grip of your emotions

This is one of the biggest obstacles you will have to overcome before you start truly winning. What may seem evident to an observer of a hand, can render you a complete fool if you let your emotions take over and make the decisions for you.

Most new online poker players fall prey to at least one of those weaknesses. If you have any of these shortages, you should start working on eliminating them as soon as possible!

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