Your First Tournament

So you’ve learned how to play no-limit Texas Hold’em, and now you’ve decided to play your first tournament. Knowing basic no-limit Hold’em strategy such as what are the strongest starting hands (e.g. AA, KK, QQ, AK) and the advantages of playing more hands from late position is certainly important. But there are some other tournament-specific strategies to help you get the most from your first tournament.

Tournament Choices

Early in your tournament career, make sure you are comfortable with the tournaments you enter. Most importantly, choose a buy-in that you can afford. No matter what happens, that’s all you can lose, but if things go well you’ll finish in the money.

Tournaments are played according to a predetermined schedule of increases in the blinds, and eventually the antes. Take a look at the “betting structure” for a tournament before it begins to see how long the levels last and how the blinds/antes go up.

Do you like fast-paced tournaments? Then consider a “turbo” format with rapidly increasing blinds. If you want play at a more gradual pace, go for a “deep stack” tournament where you can play more hands while the blinds are relatively small.

Early Tournament Stage

During the first levels of a tournament the blinds are relatively small and there usually are no antes. Gradually the blinds go up, and at some point antes are added. These increases mean you cannot simply keep folding in order to make it deeper in the tournament, since eventually you’ll get “blinded down.”

This means you should play differently during the early, middle, and late stages of a tournament. Early on it is best to be patient, only playing strong hands and from advantageous positions if you can. Of course, you might consider that other players are being cautious, too, and thus here and there take advantage by betting -- even bluffing -- in spots where you believe you might be able to get others to fold.

You do want to accumulate some chips and increase your stack during the early part of the tournament, but it isn’t vital to do so. Much more important is simply preserving the chips you have. After all, you can lose a tournament in the first level, but you can’t win in the first level!

Middle Stage

Once the tourney reaches the middle stage you may find it necessary to open up a bit and play more hands, especially if the blinds have risen to a point where you can no longer simply fold hand after hand. It’s vital to “steal” blinds from time to time when the stakes go up.

That means you should raise quite a few hands in late position when everybody folded in front of you. The bigger the blinds get the more important it is to win your fair share of them – or more. If you’re maintaining around 25 big blinds in your stack, you can feel comfortable, but when you’re down to 10 big blinds or less, you need to pick a spot and go “all in”.

Again, you can sometimes take advantage of other players’ unwillingness to lose their stacks and pressure them to fold. Always pay attention to how many chips you have relative to an opponent. If you have more chips than your opponent does when a hand begins, you can potentially knock out the other player, but there’s no way he or she can eliminate you.

Late Stage

As you reach the late stages of the tournament, you’ll want to be mindful of how many places pay. A certain percentage of finishers receive a cash prize, although the biggest prizes are generally reserved for those making the final table.

At some point you will likely find it necessary to commit your entire stack, perhaps even without a premium hand like KK. Don’t let your stack get too small before making this decision. Ideally, if you go all in you want to be the first one in the pot, thus giving everyone else a chance to fold to your raise. And if you do get called, you want to have enough chips so that doubling up will mean a significant increase to your stack.

A good general rule of thumb for first-time tourney players is to practice patience early, but be bold late. It is much better to be going all in when the tournament has already reached the money and a cash prize awaits if you bust, than to risk it all early when there’s no money to be won.