Strategies for Beating Small Stakes Poker Tournaments by Jonathan Little

Author:Jonathan Little [Little, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2015-02-21T16:00:00+00:00

Those who play too few hands

While players who play too few hands come in numerous varieties, you can generally break this category of players down into those who play too few hands too passively and those who play too few hands too aggressively.

Those who play too few hands too passively

This type of player rarely puts a chip in the pot, especially after the flop, without what they perceive to be clearly the best hand. You will find that these players are deathly afraid of losing their entire stack. Some of them will even fold super-strong hands, such as A-K on K-8-6-2, if you apply enough pressure. That being said, some of these players will never fold hands they think are strong. They assume that since they rarely enter the pot, they have to win almost every hand they play. Be sure to pay attention to your specific opponent and quantify exactly which mistakes he is making. Trying to bluff someone who is unbluffable is a devastating mistake.

These players usually do not defend their blinds well, especially if you raise and then make a post-flop continuation bet. They refuse to continue after the flop without at least a pair. If they check-call, they usually have top pair or worse. They typically make your decisions easy by check-raising with hands that are better than top pair, allowing you to easily fold when you are beat. If you are lucky enough to find one of these players who will check-call the flop with middle pair and worse but check-raise with top pair and better, you can fire the turn every time your opponent check-calls the flop, allowing you to steal the pot whenever your opponent doesn’t improve to trips or two pair.

Most of these players think that the goal of a poker tournament is to get in the money, locking up a min-cash. This mindset is the exact opposite of what you should have. While getting in the money is nice, the real goal is to finish in the top three spots, winning a large number of buy-ins. If you min-cash in a 120 person tournament 30% of the time and lose all of the rest of them, you will lose money in the long run. However, if you win 4% of the time and lose the rest of them, you will win a ton of money. If you want to succeed at poker, you must embrace the fact that you will experience large swings to your bankroll.

There are lots of ways to crush this type of opponent, mostly by taking advantage of the fact that they will fold too often. You will find that most of these players are quick to fold when facing a pre-flop raise when they are in the blinds. If they happen to call pre-flop, they will usually fold to a post-flop continuation bet.

If one of these players is in the big blind and the players between you and the big blind are not too wild, especially if you have a reasonably tight image, from middle or late position, you should raise to roughly 2.

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