Poker Tournament Strategy: The first few levels

The first few levels of a poker tournament present certain opportunities that will not be found at any other stage of a tournament: This is especially true for large buy-in, or deep-stack tournaments, where the blinds are extremely low compared to the starting chip-stack.

Many poker players choose to play extremely tight during these levels -or don’t even show up, a la Phil Hellmuth– because the blinds are so small compared to the chip-stacks there isn’t much to be gained from playing big pots since people need the “Goods” to risk all their chips at this point. However, there is a new breed of poker player that sees the potential profit available during these early stages for the two reasons I just mentioned: The blinds are really low and players aren’t willing to bust-out without a monster.

I’ll use the World Series of Poker Main Event structure to better explain my point. At the WSOP players begin with 30,000 chips and blinds at 50/100, which gives each participant 300 big blinds to play with. So if a player brings it in for a normal raise of 3X the big blind, another player can make the call risking only about 1% of their chip stack! Even a re-raise to 900 will still allow you to play a small pair or suited connector –or any number of hands for the more risk-prone of us. Even if you were to play 10 speculative hands in these situations, and miss every single one, you will still have 90% of your starting chips.

These opportunities for players to take shots with very speculative hands at an extremely cheap price are only an option during the first levels. Even by level 5 -the start of day 2– of the extremely deep-stacked WSOP structure the standard 3X raise has grown to 1,200 chips -which would now be 4% of your starting stack-and a re-raise will all but kill any implied odds you might have. But you have to consider that since players have been mixing it up for 5 levels either your chip-stack or that of your opponents might be well below the 30,000 you started with. Therefore, if you, or your opponent, are down to 21,000 chips a raise to 1,200 is nearing 6% of your stack, which starts pushing us out of the implied odds zone.

Your goal in playing all these speculative hands is to accumulate as many chips as you possibly can, and the more you accumulate, the longer you can prolong the early stages -of course this doesn’t apply if your opponent hasn’t been accumulating chips.

There are quite a few reasons to play a lot of hands during these first few levels:

• You’re looking for opportunities to cripple the players who just can’t release their over-pairs and TPTK type hands, when you flop a big hand.
• Since most people are in survival mode you’ll be able to win a lot of small pots -but since they were raised they will be big enough to beimportant– when your opponents miss.
• You’ll build up a nice image of a loose player who is not to be trifled with. Both of which can be used in your favor: You can suddenly tighten-up as the blinds increase, getting paid off on your premium hands: And you have built up what Lee Nelson calls in “Kill Everyone” ‘Fear Equity, where your opponents know that battling you will put a lot of their chips at risk.

Now the WSOP Main Event is an exception to the rule, and in most tournaments these opportunities to play a lot of hands last a mere level or two -if they exist at all-so take advantage of them while you can!