Your first goal in a tournament should be to accumulate enough chips to get you deep in a tournament. There are numerous approaches to chip accumulation and the style you employ will depend on your personal playing traits and how your table is playing. Let’s look at three common chip accumulation approaches:
1 – The passive, limp in and see a lot of flops approach – with this approach your objective is to limp in and see as many cheap flops as you possibly can, including calling small raises with a wide range of hands. Your reasoning for doing this is to take advantage of your opponent’s post-flop mistakes. For example, let’s say you limp in after two other limpers with 6-5 off suit on the button. The big blind, who has pocket aces, makes it 400 to go with the blinds at 50/100, both limpers call and you do as well. The flop comes K-6-5. A dangerous flop for your hand, but one that is most likely best. The pocket aces guy bets 1,200 into the 1,600 pot. The other two players fold. You make it 3,500 to go and your opponent snap pushes without thinking through the hand. You call and bust him and have accomplished your goal of accumulating chips. This is the main reason behind employing this approach, however, it does come with some risk. In order to pull this off, you will need to be a very strong, post-flop player.
2 – The small ball approach. This is the approach commonly used by pros like Daniel Negreanu and Gus Hansen and it’s very similar to #1 with the exception being that instead of limping in, the small baller will take control of the action with small pre-flop raises and post-flop bets. The goal is the same as in #1 – get players to make post-flop mistakes but the raising and betting induces more action and also allows you to pick up pots on bluffs. In #1, you’re relegated mainly to picking up pots when you have hands and even when you do have hands your opponents might notice you waking up and not give you action. The small ball approach, however, keeps your opponents continuously guessing as you are constantly applying pressure.
3 – The tight aggressive big pot approach. If you’re not comfortable with post-flop play, this is the approach you should consider using. A player using this approach will only play big hands or play hands in position. Their goal is to get as much money as possible in the pot pre-flop so that their post-flop decisions are relatively simple to make. For example, let’s say a player has opened the action to 300 with the blinds at 50/100. Our hero has kings and rather than just making a standard raise to say 1,000, he makes it 2,500 to go. He’s looking to get all his money in pre-flop if possible and if he is just called, he knows that most likely the rest of the money, or a good chunk of it, is going in on the flop. Believe it or not there is actually some merit to using this approach because of the hyper-aggressive nature of today’s players. A surprising number of players would have no problem calling a re-raise that is over 10% of their stack because after all, they have “implied odds.”
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