Poker Articles Index

Be A Poker Shark

The initial levels of tournaments are a free-money feeding frenzy for the right shark.  If you want to earn your fins and sharpen your teeth follow this advice: be loose-aggressive.  It is probably wise to play about 75% of the hands you are dealt from the seats 4 and more passed the button and about 25% of the hands before there.  Position is important for this stroke.  Notably there are no additional hands played at the button due to the fact that people will expect you to bet and then check raise you.  That is plain bad for your poker chips stack.

With the bottom third of the hands that you are playing you are going to limp in.  At the flop you will hope to hit or be able to fold everybody by betting pot or more.  The pot is negligible here and if you think about it is only equal to about one blind in 15 minutes time.  Most people have forgotten this and will fold in order to exercise proper pot odds.  If they don’t then you can try again on the turn and river depending on your read.

With the remainder of the poker cards that you are going to play your goal is to limit the field.  The first step is to bet or raise preflop.  For example: blinds are 10/20 and everybody started with 1,000 and average stack is 1,100 (it’s a re-buy tournament).  Raise the bet to 200.  If anybody calls, and then either bets small or checks, you should make it 300 to see the turn.  If they called they should still have about half of their stack.  If they are obviously on a flush or straight draw you need to determine if it is better to give them a free river card and then to fold them on the river or to try to fold them now for the rest of their stack. The pot odds might be ok for them to call all in on a flush draw but a tight player most likely won’t. This is because of the negative implied odds given that they will have to re-buy or be out of the tournament if they miss the draw.

Poker Articles

• Origin of Poker
• Top Money Winners
• The Flop
• Be A Shark
• Short Stack Suicide
• Turning Rocks to Dust
• 10 Key Skills
• Playing High Stakes
• Slow Playing

After a while of playing like the most aggressive person ever to survive a tournament and after the blinds have grown up it is time to revert to your normal game.The shark suit comes back out of the closet though the minute that re-buys end. Here you can swim circles around your table again because they are all so afraid of premature termination. Good work, you have earned your fins.