No-Limit Texas Hold'em Tournament Strategy- Improving Your Game
No-Limit Texas Hold'em is a game unlike any other game you have played in your life. The skill required to be average is relatively simple. Taking your game to the next level requires to you unlearn all of the established strategy at the previous level.
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Starting hand requirements and pot odds literally go out the window when you are at the higher level. Most books will never detail higher level poker because most people simply won't understand it. In order to become a great player, you have to take a lot more chances than the average tight-aggressisve tournament player.
It is possible to win tournaments by playing tight conservative poker, but this is not the optimal strategy. The players who have the most success are picking up many uncontested pots. The best players play loose aggressive and could have any two cards at any time. They will call out of position with cards the books tell you is trash. They will raise with any two cards and win many pots. The higher level of poker requires that you forget about your own cards. Rather than knowing how to play each hand, you are trying to figure out how to play each opponent.
When you can play your opponent, your hand doesn't really matter. You are trying to find weaknesses within your opponent's strategy that you can exploit. Against a calling station, you simply play tight aggressive poker. Against a good player, you can find spots where it is tough for him to make a call. Many players are unable to make tough calls for the remainder of their chips. Your willingness to push your opponent off marginal hands is an extra edge that you can exploit.
Focusing on your opponent's tendencies may take some time to get used to. It is very mentally draining at first and requires a lot of trust in your reads. At first, you will be losing a lot of pots but stick with it. Eventually your reads will be automatic and it will be like playing your opponents with their hands face up.
Checking in Poker
I think checking is one of the most important actions in a poker game. Almost everyone dismisses another player’s check. Keeping this mind can be very helpful when playing. There are three reasons that someone checks.
They don’t have anything
They want to find out what others have
They want to trap someoneWay too often it is only number 1, you simply check every time you have a bad or marginal hand. Checking is of course most powerful when used in combination with a preceding or a subsequent bet. Someone who an overwhelming majority of the time that check/folds, is losing out on using a check to their advantage. About 70 to 80 percent of all your hands during a game are hands you will fold, both pre or post flop (Unless you’re an aggressive player, all you Gus Hansen’s of the world). If you check and fold all these hands, any good player will know to simply leave you alone when you do something other then fold after a check. You have to mix up this majority with check/raises, and check/calls. Mixing up your checks in this manner requires bluffing. Bluffing is an article all by itself but combining it with checking is extremely useful. We all want to slow play our monsters, checking the turn to trap the player and raise them after they bet. The problem with this, aside from getting that monster hand at the right time, is all players know about the check/raise. So use the check/raise in a bluff. Bluffing is hard enough to do, if you simply bet big in first position you might get your bluff called, almost every hand someone bets, so bluffing like that is simply about timing, hoping that particular hand you bluff that no one else has anything. But if you combine the bluff with a check/raise, this will have a greater effect on other players because it is less common.Gathering info; the other purpose of the check is to try to find out what others have. This is very common after the flop. For example 3 or 4 people are still in the hand and the flop comes, and everyone checks. This is extremely common in online games, it is difficult “reading” players when playing online but a check can be very informative. It stands to reason (in a large majority of the cases) that they are checking because their hand is a bust. You check in first position and everyone checks, the turn comes, come out firing, unless the turn card drastically changes the community cards such as the fourth card of the same suit or an easy straight possibility, even if a player calls you or you get caught with another player check raising you, you’ve lost your bet, but you’ve gained two great advantages. You’ve shown the other players you don’t just check bad hands, and if you slow play a hand, other players won’t know.
They don’t have anything
They want to find out what others have
They want to trap someoneWay too often it is only number 1, you simply check every time you have a bad or marginal hand. Checking is of course most powerful when used in combination with a preceding or a subsequent bet. Someone who an overwhelming majority of the time that check/folds, is losing out on using a check to their advantage. About 70 to 80 percent of all your hands during a game are hands you will fold, both pre or post flop (Unless you’re an aggressive player, all you Gus Hansen’s of the world). If you check and fold all these hands, any good player will know to simply leave you alone when you do something other then fold after a check. You have to mix up this majority with check/raises, and check/calls. Mixing up your checks in this manner requires bluffing. Bluffing is an article all by itself but combining it with checking is extremely useful. We all want to slow play our monsters, checking the turn to trap the player and raise them after they bet. The problem with this, aside from getting that monster hand at the right time, is all players know about the check/raise. So use the check/raise in a bluff. Bluffing is hard enough to do, if you simply bet big in first position you might get your bluff called, almost every hand someone bets, so bluffing like that is simply about timing, hoping that particular hand you bluff that no one else has anything. But if you combine the bluff with a check/raise, this will have a greater effect on other players because it is less common.Gathering info; the other purpose of the check is to try to find out what others have. This is very common after the flop. For example 3 or 4 people are still in the hand and the flop comes, and everyone checks. This is extremely common in online games, it is difficult “reading” players when playing online but a check can be very informative. It stands to reason (in a large majority of the cases) that they are checking because their hand is a bust. You check in first position and everyone checks, the turn comes, come out firing, unless the turn card drastically changes the community cards such as the fourth card of the same suit or an easy straight possibility, even if a player calls you or you get caught with another player check raising you, you’ve lost your bet, but you’ve gained two great advantages. You’ve shown the other players you don’t just check bad hands, and if you slow play a hand, other players won’t know.
