Near the Money Tournament Strategies

What makes a close-to-money tournament strategy different?

If the tournament is a freeze-out, which means you are out when your chips go to 0, your chips become
more valuable as time goes on. In tournaments, you do not make the same plays as you would in ring
games. For instance, you might call A4 suited in a ring game, but in a tournament, it is a common fold
(with certain assumptions).

With tournament play andtravelinsurance.com, people will draw for their hands less than they would during ring games because they want to last as long as possible to make money. If you are good enough to make the money
then you will be getting paid from this point going forward depending on how long you last. This is key.
How long you last in the tournament, determines the amount of money you make. This is why the value
of your chips is important as time goes on.

With this in mind. You now know that playing ring games is a different strategy altogether. The bets
and calls have different reasons behind them. As time goes on, blinds increase forcing you to shift your
strategy. Stack sizes also affect your strategy as well. If you do not maintain a reasonable chip stack, the
blinds will eventually catch up to your stack and you will be forced all in from the blinds.

The basic principles are:

Big stacks push little stacks to steal blinds.
Little stacks make aggressive risky plays often with inferior cards.
Play to win or play to be in the money.
You can smell the money
Here are some samples strategies you can utilize during your tournament play if you are fortunate
enough to be close to being in the money.

Steal from the middleman

Assumptions: You have a large stack you are able to raise the blinds by 3-4x without it hurting your
stack if you had to throw it away or call an all-in from a smaller stack &quot The money&quot is 1-5 spots away.
We recommend pushing the medium stacks at this point. If you push the small stacks they are more
than likely to go all in and the risk is higher that you will have to utilize more of your chips than
necessary.

Since you are not guaranteed victory, you can easily lose a lot of chips right before the money. Not a
good thing. The medium stacks are likely not to play games with the larger stacks because they know
they can easily make & quote the money&quot if they just play conservatively. So if re a big stack and you’re in
this position, push the medium stacks and get rewarded.
David beat Goliath

Assumptions: You are one of the smaller stacks left in the tournament your all-in bet will cover more
then two big blinds the money is spotted away.

Make aggressive moves against the large stacks and the medium stacks. However, I think you need to be
warier of the medium stacks here. The medium stacks usually respect the big stacks but do NOT respect
people that are about to taste the rail. Psychologically every big stack knows they want to get into
all-in pots if they have to. They want to protect what they worked so hard to gather.