I have played poker for a number of years and one of the things that I have found is that most players will play any hand, especially if they have a lot of chips. Obviously you cannot pay very much attention to your hands when you have thousand of others sitting at the table and you can only watch your opponents. However, I do believe that you should be more selective when you are in early position and your starting hand is bad. There are many reasons for this, so I will cover the two main reasons that I believe you should fold in early position.
- In early position you don’t know where the button is, so you are at a huge disadvantage.
- Even if you have pocket kings or aces, you aren’t actually favored to win the hand, since so many other players will be in front of you.
If you are in early position,I suggest you just like the latter strategy, and then you can just fold everything else. In fact, this is the best strategy for beginners since they still have the initiative, and it is the easiest to implement.
But, later in the day, when you are in later position, you have two huge advantages. The first is that you can see how the other players react to their cards. The second is that you have a much better idea of what cards your opponents have, since you can see how they bid.
Since you can see what cards the other players have, you can then adjust you hand. If you have the idea that you have the best hand, you can then raise a little, or go all in. When you really think you have the best hand, you can even pretend to have a bad hand and beat everybody with a huge bet.
The second example is a little more complicated, and it involves playing against a skilled player who is likely to have a better hand than you, at least. This is more common in Bolagila tournaments than in regular tournaments. In the latter case, you do not necessarily have to have the best hand to win, since the thing to ensure is that you act after them. To make a long story short, if you play against these tournaments, you do not necessarily have to win every pot, but you want to win enough hands that you will be paid out more than you cost yourself to enter the tournament in the first place.
Both of these kinds of tournaments require that you have some skill, whether it is reading your opponents, figuring out what cards they have, or calling bets that are too big for your stack. If you do not have that skill, you will lose very quickly in the lower levels. I have been very successful in playing at the lower levels, because I had a lot more time to spend in the beginning until I had a few hundred in my stack, and I was not pushed out as fast as the other players.
The thing about tournaments is that you will win, or be close to winning, some hands, and lose, or nearly lose, many other hands. The number of big losses in tournaments is much higher than the number of big wins. If you see a tournament with a $1,000 buy-in, and a player goes all-in with a coin flip, you can easily be convinced that they are not going to make it. Even with a $1,000 stack, if a player is risking their entire stack to win 1 or 2 blinds, they are not making a good bet.
Cash games are a little different. because they have a beginning and end, you can spend a lot of time at your table, and not be risking anything unless you pick a good hand. You can sit and wait for a good hand, and sometimes you will win with a bad hand (which was supposed to be a good one). This keeps the game interesting, and if you are good enough, you can run a few winnings off of other players, and leave yourself a little money in your pocket.
Of course, if you want the real excitement of tournament play, you have to play with a lot more money, and this brings in a whole new element of play. In a regular poker game, you are just playing your cards, and have no real idea how you are going to play. In a tournament, you have to sort out your play, and make decisions all throughout the hand. This requires a great deal of skill, since you have no other information about your opponents, except for the cards that they play.
As a result, players that are good at tournament play, tend to be better players overall. They have had to think hard and determine a good strategy, and then play it and wait for the results to come back at them.