Betfair Bonus

Tournament Strategy

For those who don’t know, playing tournaments are quite different to regular cash games, and the strategy varies considerably.  Not only this, but the poker strategy you apply in tournaments at Betfair should vary depending on the stage of the tournament, your chip size, and the type of players on your table.

Early Tournament Strategy

At the start of the tournament, you should only be playing your best hands possible.  This includes any high pockets, AK AQ AJ, and possibly high suited connectors or middle pockets (depending on your table position and implied odds).  The reason you need to play so tight at this stage in the tournament is that there are so many players on your table.  This makes it very likely at least one will have a great hand, so entering the pot with a poor hand will usually just cost you chips facing a dominating hand.  Another reason for playing tight so early on, is that your chipstack in relation to the blinds in most tourneys is very low – plus you only have one buy-in.  This means you can’t afford to take risks calling the flop with bad hands, because at the end of the day you will just bleed your chips away.  Don’t worry about doubling up too quickly at the beginning of a tournament, there’s plenty of time for this in the middle stages.

Middle Tournament Strategy

The middle stages of a poker tournament are most important, because it’s where you need to accumulate most your chips, and its also where the blinds/antes become significantly large.  This increases the value of each pot, which makes it more important to bluff and use aggressive tactics such as 3betting, value shoving and blind stealing.  Its important if you want to succeed in tournaments, to constantly take advantage of your table position and pick off weak players.   The middle stages of tournaments is also importantly because it’s where you’ll reach the bubble i.e. payoff level.  You can afford to open your hands and starting range a little more now to include smaller pockets, suited connectors and generally anything else with potential.  If you become short-stacked (less than 20xBB), you need to be going all in regularly and value shoving to double up.  Try to get your stack in as early as possible with any of your top 70% of hands dealt. 

Late Tournament Strategy

Most importantly, make sure you change the way you play as the tables become short-handed.  You should open your starting hand range up greatly to include even mediocre hands like A7 or J9.  Another important rule of thumb in the late stages of a tournament is avoid heady confrontations with a deep stack (unless of course you have him dominated).  Playing against big stacks at this late stage can end your entire tournament, and its much more practical and less risky to focus on picking off the small-medium stacks first.  If you find yourself small stacked at this stage, it might be best to sit out and hope someone goes out before you, giving you a better payday.  For a big stack at this stage, you should be looking at 1^st place, so keep playing aggressively and hitting back at players, however make sure you don’t aimlessly throw your chips about.  Be the policeman at the table, not the village idiot.

Poker Bankroll Management Tips

Poker bankroll management defines how you should use you current bankroll to eliminate risk and variance from your game.  While poker is a game of skill, there is no question over the element of luck and chance that predominate the game.  Because of this, your required to use your bankroll in specific way to eliminate the variance and bad beat within the game.

Playing Cash Games

When you’re playing cash games, you’re required to buy-in to a table with enough chips to cover 100 big blinds.  For instance, if you want to play at a table with 10p/20p blinds, you’re going to need £20 or more to buy-in.  The figure is high because you have be able to cover the variance and risk associated with poker.  You may lose chips in the blinds before you’re dealt a good hand, so you need to be able to cover these factors.

Another important tip, is that you should have a total bankroll of around 30-50 table buy-ins for the level of cash games your playing.  This is to stop you risking your entire bankroll in one game of poker.  Even the best players in the world have to stick to these guidelines. Over 80% of online poke players lose money.  These players usually won’t stick to bankroll management strategy, which is why many of them are losing money.

Tournament Bankroll Management

Tournaments are fun, exciting, and trendy nowadays.  The big point to remember is that tournaments carry a lot of risk – the number of entrants involved in comparison to the number of payoff places in a typical tournament means you’ll probably need to play a number of tourneys before you make any money back.  This makes bankroll management even more important than cash games, because the variance is much higher.  Just make sure you only enter tournaments you can afford to play 40 times over with your current bankroll.  You can’t expect to hit 1^st place prize in massive tournaments in one attempt. 

Example: You want to enter a $10 MTT (multi-table tournament).  This means you’ll need a total bankroll of 40×10 = $400.  You’ll need at least $400 to be able to play this type of tournament.  Most importantly, the figure is even higher for re-buy tournaments, because you’re expected to be willing to sacrifice up to 5xbuy-ins for each re-buy tournament you enter (this is an important part of re-buy strategy, which requires you to play much riskier, and the chances of busting out are higher).  For a $10 re-buy tournament, you’ll need a total bankroll of 5x10x40 = $2000.

Playing SNGs

SNGs (Sit and Goes) are like smaller tournaments with only 6 – 50 players.  The rule of thumb here is to have enough bankroll to cover around 30 SNG buy-ins for whichever game you’re playing.

 What Makes a Good Poker Player?

Millions of people play poker, 200,000 players sign up online poker accounts each month, however still only 5% of players online actually make profit playing poker.  Normally this is because loosing players and negligent, and don’t take the time to learn strategy and improve their game.

The following article will cover some of the basic qualities that make solid online poker players.

Mathematics & Pot Odds

Success in online poker is heavily accredited to making fast, calculated decisions with respect to pot odds and expected value.  If you haven’t come across these terms before you need to read up on them as they are the corner stone of playing the modern poker game profitably.  To put it in simple terms, for every decision you make in poker (call, fold or raise) you are taking a risk with regards to your chip stack and bankroll. Playing hands with positive expected value means you are playing in a way where the rewards are greater than the risks. 

By studying the probability of winning the hand (“outs”), along with the current size of the pot and the amount it cost to enter (“call”), you can easily work out whether you’re playing profitably with regards to expected value and pot odds.

Playing with a Proper Bankroll

This is a topic I covered in another article, so I’ll just go over the basics here.  Bankroll management is about reducing the risks in your game that are associated with variance and bad beats.  By only risking a small proportion of your total bankroll in each game, you reduce the risks massively and remove element of “luck” in poker in the long term.  Bankroll management is incredibly important if you want to make money over the long-run in poker.

Discipline

All the world’s best poker players, whether live or online, need to be disciplined.  Although you may think a bad call here or there might not be worth much, when you’re playing in the long run these “little mistakes” will add up to a sizeable amount.  Being disciplined means not playing loose when you’re bored, not getting tilted because you lose an unlucky hand, and not getting tired and reckless half way through your game. Discipline is about maintaining a level of quality in your game, and not being negligent over the poker strategy you’ve learned.

Don’t Play Obvious

One of the most important parts of poker is to keep your opponent guessing, and not playing in an obvious manner with lots of tells.  This is important for both live and online poker.  Bluffing is an important part of poker too, but if players can read you too easily than you won’t make much money in poker over the long-run.  In order to make yourself non-obvious, try playing hands differently, bluffing occasionally, and taking advantage of your table position to steal the blinds.