Strategy
Making Strategic Adjustments To Play Multi Table Texas Holdem Tournaments
The ability to adjust and adopt to particular situations that arise when playing poker is crucial to your success. The failure to adopt and adjust often makes the difference between very good poker players and very poor poker players. The same applies when playing in different types of poker games.
No limits Texas Holdem Poker has a number of forms, all of which are easily accessible at your designated online poker room. You can play Heads Up Texas Holdem, Texas Holdem cash games, single table Texas Holdem tournaments and multi table Texas Holdem tournaments. Here i will talk about multi table Texas Holdem tournaments and the adjustments required to play successfully.
To begin, if you are fond of single table tournaments, making the adjustments required here may take time. The main, and most obvious differences between the both is the number of players. At a single table tournament you may face off against up to 9 players. In multi table tournaments however, you may face up to 999. This means you may have to beat over a hundred times more players, right? Wrong! You just have to remain patient and play very tight.
Most of the multi table tournaments i have entered had no more than 500 players so dont let the figures discourage you. One of the toughest parts of surviving in multi table tournaments is remaining patient. I believe playing tight poker is the easiest part. Only get involved in a pot of you have a top hand. High pairs are ideally the only cards you should play at the early stages of the tournaments. I have even heard of some players claiming that the only hands they play in these very early stages are pocket Aces. Personally i regard this as too tight but just to give you an idea.
As the game progresses you will see that in the first half hour or so, hundreds of players that dont play conservatively drop like flies. The closer you get to double figures the slower you will see people leave the table. You should loosen up as the number of players falls and play more hands. I prefer to wait until the player count on the bottom of the screen slows down just a bit and then play a few more hands, but only good hands in good positions. Just because a couple of hundred players have been knocked out doesnt mean you resort to your normal style of play.
The idea is to look out for the different stages as they near and plan ahead. When the player count reached double figures loosen up even more. You dont want to get to the final table short stacked so try and build your stack here.
If you reach the final table this means you are going to get paid a nice sum. Why throw it away here though. This is the table everybody wants to get to and make an impression. It will probably be the table that takes the longest to complete. Competition here is tough. All these players beat off hundreds of others to get here. Here is where you need your poker cap on.
At the start of the tournament you played extremely tight and gradually loosened up. I think it is wise to apply a similar strategy here while incorporating all the basics into your strategy such as using table position, table image and also seek tells that other players may have. This is the most intimate table of the tournament so dont rush in without a thought. Everybody is scoping everybody else out so stay relaxed and maybe sit back and watch others play for a few hand to get the feel for things. Then when you feel you have acquired a feel for the table, get involved, starting by playing tight poker (this will help your table image as you are playing only to hands) and gradually loosen up as play goes on.
If you apply the elements discussed above such as playing really tight at the early stages and gradually loosen up as the tournaments progresses you will see the difference in final position.