I have jumped into a poker tournament and I have only played a handful of times.
It is texas holdem, with 16 players at two tables. Then the top four from each table go to the final table with the top three taking home something.
So anyway, I know poker is playing the player and such but I think that if I could get some common sense tips and memorize a hand odds table (a link if anyone has one please), I might be able to at least not be out first.
With eight players at a table, it seems that hands will have to be good to win because of the sheer amount of cards out there. Do I play jacks or better and otherwise fold?
Further, I hear talk of bet amounts and timing being the real game. Any tips or information regarding this?
The players I will be playing with all play rather frequently.
Help me
This is more of an IMHO since there really isn’t a factual answer to the question of how do you play poker. Every decision is going to be dependent on a lot of other factors, including your read on the other players, your postion at the table, your relative chip strength, your table image, and oh yeah, your cards are sort of impotant too.
I’ll let others offer up their tips since my play is a bit skewed at the moment (no one likes a bad beat story so I’ll refrain). As far as the mechanics of your particular tournament go, I’d suggest that you insist on hand-for-hand play, meaning that the hands at both tables has to conclude before the next hand begins. This will prevent someone from stalling their way onto the final table.
Wow, this is tough to do in a few paragraphs. I can’t think of any beginning strategy books on tournament play off the top of my head. Harrington on Hold’em Vol 2 and Tournament Poker for Advanced Players are both great, but probably well beyond your level at this point. I’ve heard that McEvoy’s Championship Satellite Strategy is good for the beginning type player.
If you don’t have time to read a book, here are some basic tips:
Play almost exclusively premium hands. These are AA-JJ, AK and AQ suited. Against a raise, play even tighter.
Play fewer hands in earlier position–mainly the premiums.
In later position, you can play lesser hands like suited connectors (98, 76, etc.) and smaller pairs if you can get in cheaply and there are a few other players in the pot. If after a few orbits it’s clear that everyone at the table is pretty passive (i.e., few raises, mainly checking and calling), you can play some of these hands from earlier position as well. If no one has entered yet, you can steal the blinds by open-raising with good but not great hands like TT, AJ, etc.
Don’t play timid. Very common beginner mistake, especially in no-limit hold em. An important poker concept is called “fold equity.” Without getting too mathy on you, what it basically means is that a lot of the value from a play is getting other people to fold. If there was never any folding in poker, the best hand would always win, and it would be a game of pure luck. Don’t just sit there and call. If you’re hand isn’t great, fold. If it is, raise or reraise.
4b) The all-in move. Again, lots of beginners hate moving all in because it puts their entire tournament life at stake. Live with it. Moving all in at the right time is very important, due to the fold equity concept listed above. Also, it takes away much of the skill advantage your opponents have over you. They can’t outplay you when they’re down to two choices: call or fold.
If you get short-stacked (that is, have few chips left), you need to make more speculative moves or else the blinds will eat you alive. There’s no exact formula, but if you have less than 5 times the big blind, you’ll need to move ASAP. Again, fold equity is huge. Moving all in with a hand like 44 is fine, because you might get everyone else to fold, and even if you don’t, you have a decent chance of winning as long as you’re not up against a higher pair. But calling an all-in with 44 is much worse, unless you or the other guy is ultra short-stacked. You’re only a coin flip against a crap hand like Q6s, which would have probably folded had you made the move.
Good luck! You’ll need it. Tournament NLHE has a huge luck factor, especially a small 16 player tourney. Don’t feel too bad if you don’t do well.
Final words of advice: never try to bluff a calling station.
What is a calling station?
I never thought of playing the tables hand for hand. Good point Otto.
Thanks for the tips and the links.
What are some decent sites to play free poker to at least get some hands in front of me. Pokerstars.net is a commercial that I have seen. Any others?
I’d disagree with the notion that you should only play premium starting hands (especially if you’re waiting for JJ or better – you might never ge to tplay a hand if you stick to the that). In live tournament home games, standards usually go way down. So your KJ offsuit, normally trash, is quite playable even in early position so long as the pot is unraised. Some tips:
Pay attention to the cards that the other players are showing. Are they showing nothing but pocket pairs and AQ? Then you’d better tighten up, as well. Are you seeing some Q8 suited? Then you can play big card poker (any two cards 10 or over will usually be playable).
Probably play pretty tight after the flop. If you have top pair or better, you can play the hand strongly and for lots of chips, but don’t put in much money with something less.
Tend to bet, raise, or fold. Calling is rarely the correct play, as it leaves just one way to win the hand (having the best cards). If you bet or raise, there are two ways to win. Also, a small bet with a mediocre hand could scare someone into just calling who would otherwise have put in a large (difficult to call) bet himself. This is known as a blocking bet (if your blocking bet gets raised, you have an easier fold since bet-raise is scarier than check-bet, which could mean anything).
Most importantly: pay attention to the odds you’re getting from the pot. You don’t have to keep track of precisely how much is in the middle at all times, but you should always have a pretty good estimate in your head. Weigh the the odds the pot is offering versus the liklihood that your hand is best (or will become best), and act accordingly.
Then think about implied pot odds: the additional money that is likely to go into the pot later in the hand if you catch the cards you need.
Also think about reverse implied pot odds: the amount of money you might have to put into the pot later in the hand to see if your hand is good.
Be courteous at all times.
Here are some more Hold’em odds.
I think Opus 1 gives you a very solid beginner strategy and is the best way to start playing IMO.
Eventually you will start to understand things about the game/players and you game will take a shift, but only the play of lots of hands can give you that insight.
For the beginner get used to the idea of folding. You will be folding much more than you think and might even fold your way to the final table. :eek: You’ll get tired of it because it’s not fun. You might start thinking about playing marginal hands just to see some action. The best advice I can give you is not to do that. Instead pay very close attention to EVERY had that is delt at the table if you are in it or not. You’ll start to see patterns and situations that will allow you to play “any two” and it’s those situations where you will not only be able to play 94os you can raise with it and take down the pot. You really need to know when your garbage is good and when it’s total garbage.
There are games where you won’t see many/any of the premium hands you want and if you do you won’t get any action on them. Blinds will kill you and you’ll finish middle to late but out of the money. Enough of those games and you will learn to make moves when the time is right, stealing blinds, reading players, bluffing, semi bluffing, and the other tools that will get you to the money.
A lot of really good poker books come from two plus two publishing and some from Cardoza. They are expensive but worth the $. Watch out for the new celebrity type books high on bragging, story telling, and totally useless information.
Calling stations will call just about any bet. It does not matter what cards they hold or what is on the board. They also tend to catch miracle one outers on the river a lot. Once you identify a calling station you need to use that information to your advantage.
If you really want to learn to play poker for $ there are no free games that will help you. The play is so insane that you will learn bad habits and play reckless poker to survive in the game. I’m sure many people play free sites and think differently but I’m sure they just don’t know any better (or worse). Almost every poker site has a free game section and Party Poker has a big one if you want to see hands, follow the progression, etc…Just don’t say I didn’t warn you but it will not teach you anything about how real cards are played. When people start forking over cash for stacks, and drawing for seats…It’s a very different game.
Don’t bother, as the free tables on those sites bear no relation to actual poker. If you wanted to put a few bucks into an account, there are plenty of cheap ($5-$10) tournaments available every day.
PokerStars is an excellent site, with reliable software, good customer support, and a large pool of players. They also have micro-limit No Limit Hold’em cash games, which are excellent for getting your feet wet. (I think they still have tables 1 cent and 2 cent blinds, but if not they certainly have .10-.20 blind tables.)
Oh yes, one more (redundant) piece of advice: as has been mentioned, position in No Limit Hold’em is extremely important. No matter what kind of starting hand requirements you choose to play, they should be much looser around back than up front. If you notice that most of your opponents are calling are putting money into the put with weak hands (3rd pair etc.), or that the table is generally passive (lots of checking and calling, not so much betting and raising), then you can call in late position (on the button or one off) with some very weak hands.
Acting last is a huge advantage – you can see when no one is showing much strength and a bluff has a good chance to be successful; you’ll usually know how much it will cost you to continue in the hand, so you’ll be able to tell if you’re getting the right odds. Etc.
Pay Attention.
This might sound obvious, but most people don’t, especially when they are not in the hand, which will be most of the time. I like to construct a narrative about each hand, based on my observations. This helps me stay focused. Generally I don’t bother drawing conclusions about individual’s play, I just let my subconcious do that. Many players play by instinct, just make sure that instinct is informed by careful observation.
And, somewhat contradictorily, the first person to bet will often be the one who takes down a pot, particularly post-flop. So it’s not a bad idea to show strength by betting early at times, to scare those in late position into thinking you have a hand.
There is plenty of good advice here, but of course there is no right answer, you really have to play a lot of hands to treally understand what is good what is bad and how you can play the players, play position etc.
One thing unmentioned is trying to stay off tilt. Everyone gets a bad beat put on them or gets trapped (someone pretneding to be playing weak cards when in reality they are really strong, hence you get trapped into putting a lot of chips into the pot). What happens to almost everybody at some point when this happens is they get mad and they think they need to get their chips back right away. Basically you are on tilt when you are playing a hand aggresively because you just lost and you are steaming.
Whenever I get a bad beat I actually put more limits on the hands I will play for the next coupleof hands. Gives me a chance to cool down and get that bad hand out of my system.
I can’t see how you deal to a 16 man table without a lot of flashing and mis-deals for starters.
Not like the new guy has any pull on the tournament director but 3 tables of 10/11/11 and consolidating down at -6 until you get a final table of 10 would be my preference.
Not as necessary as if it were final eight, but if one table is playing significantly more hands than the other then the players at the faster acting table are still at an overall disadvantage.
It’s not 16 people to a table. It’s 16 total players, eight per table.
In that case I’d play it as two separate single table tournaments. It should not be hard to make the final 4 out of the first table by playing tight giving you a shot at the money.
Then you are 50/50 from the second table I’d open up a LOT straight away because if you get a big stack you can cruise into the money. Yeah, I can see it now……where is this game at
Just chiming in to agree with this. I started playing in no-limit hold 'em tournaments about two months ago, having never played a single hand of any kind of poker in my life. I’ve participated in seven tournaments, and didn’t win a single hand in the first five. But that sixth tournament started with 9 players, and I finished 2[sup]nd[/sup] – in the money! The most recent one also started with 9 players, and I finished 4[sup]th[/sup]. I still do some dumb things, but I think I’m finally past things like folding when I could have checked. Now I need to focus on getting out of my “beginner” mode: I raised for the first time ever last week, and it was cool because it threw everyone off, but I need to start raising at (seemingly) random times before it becomes a tell.
I won’t be playing in this week’s tournament because I’m going out of town, but I’m looking forward to playing again next week.
Another simplified approach is to raise about the same amount every time. It has the same effect on reading but is not as hard to randomize in a way that gets you play when you want it and loosing bets where you don’t.
If you see me raising 3 X BB with AA, 72, QQ, AK, 78, and 88 then I’m raising you 3X the BB what range of hands do you put me on?
