Playing the early stages in sit and go or multi table tournaments requires a lot of patience. Often times to the point of being bored while folding hand after hand after hand. However, you may have seen or read from some of the professional or rounders online that playing potential hands like connectors or gapped suited connectors or low pairs can be very profitable. In a sense, that is true if your hand actually hits. That’s a big IF, because more times than not, playing them is going to cost you money unless you take the following precautions.
Connectors are the good looking medium sized cards that have straight potential. Low pairs are 22 through 66. The reason a lot of players like to play them is because they tend to win the biggest pots of the tournament when your straight or set fills up. That happens all too rarely so when you have the inclination to play drawing hands you should be looking for exceptional odds, a very strong read on your opponent, or a certain chip stack situation.
Getting good odds in the early stages of a tournament requires that you get a good look a sizeable pot before you make your decision to enter it. That inherently means that you will be in late position, which is exactly the right thing to do. You should be tossing all drawing hands from early and middle position, as the potential for re-raising is going to get you into difficult decisions based on pot odds when the play comes back around.
Another spot you might consider drawing hands is when your stack is very big OR very small OR when you opponent’s stack is very small compared to yours. As a short stack, if you can get heads up with a drawing hand you are usually in a decent spot to double up, and based on tournament dynamics it may be exactly the thing to do even if you go in behind. As a big stack, you can bet with many hands, and as drawing hands are perfectly well hidden, the idea is to take pots down pre-flop or pre-turn using stack pressure. This is especially true when the tournament is in the near the money stage.
If you have a very good read and history file in your Tournament Indicator on your opponent then a play against a mouse or a jackal may be acceptable here, although this requires more experience and read ability and will put in contention a chunk of your stack if not extra careful. I would rather play drawing hands against a mouse where a lousy (low card) flop would likely have missed his over-cards. Then a simple bet out will take down most pots in that situation. Against a jackal, a ragged flop may have actually hit his hand.
You should really leave the fancy plays and good reads to the professionals at this stage of your playing career. It is hard to play them no matter what level and will generally cost you a lot of chips. So keep your tight-on in low limit poker as big cards will win you enough big hands to make you a profitable player and build your bankroll.
Marty Smith reviews all online poker calculators and software so you know what you are getting into before you buy one. He also offers a free poker tournament video series to improve your tournament poker game.
Tags: poker odds calculator, tournament strategy
