Poker Tournament Strategy - The Middle Stages
In The Middle of a tournament is where you can start to exploit the odds. All other things being equal, the fewer the players at the table, the greater your odds of winning a hand (rhe best odds – 50/50 – are with Heads-Up or 1-on-1 play). Now that several opponents have been knocked out for you, you can sneak in and start attacking the weakest players remaining to swipe up their chips for your stack while the lucky sharks who brought them to this point are tired and overconfident.
You’ll need to accumulate a sizable chip stack in order to survive the later stages of a tournament, when the blinds are so high that folding out of almost any hand has a prohibitive price tag. Since you’ve been sitting back (more or less) in the first stage of the play, this is the time to jump in with both feet so you can stock up for the final battle ahead. Don’t worry so much about your cards as much as you should be sniffing out weakness and attacking it.
To boot, during the beginning stages of play, you should have taken those moments sitting back from the action to observe your opponents and their styles of play. By the middle of the tournament, you should have a calm and cooly assessed gauge of each of the players, their strategies, their styles, their tells, and their weaknesses. In addition to exploting weakness, then, you now have the opportunity to exploit all that as well.
Try and make all the hands you play head-up hands. If there are too many other players vying for the same pot, let them fight over it (unless you have the Nuts, of course). Save your strength, and your chips, for the battles you have the best chances of winning, and more often than not, those are one-on-one battles.
Check back for the final portion of this 3 piece article and learn how to close the deal at the end of an online poker tournament.