some world class tournament tips from ryan laplante

Some World Class Tournament Tips from Ryan Laplante

New Online PokerPoker Strategy

In this post we are going to talk about some Hand review tips that Ryan Laplante comments on whilst looking through one of his student’s hand histories from a tournament they play, it makes for some thought-provoking material from a real masterful tournament player…

All these hands we look at today are from the early stages of a tournament with a 10,000 starting stack…

3-Bet Large

A common mistake players make when 3-Betting is that they go too fancy because they want to make sure they get action with their big hands, the simple fact is low-mid stakes tournament players will not be adjusting their ranges correctly to correspond with changes in our raise sizes, so we want to maximise the number of chips in the pot with our big hands with a large 3-Bet sizing.

Here in this hand Ali makes his 3-Bet 3x the open raise and this is a good sizing, we could even go slightly larger than this because most players will be continuing with hands they open with from these earlier positions… Bad players just don’t fold good hands… so play bigger pots against them with your nutted hands!

3betting larger

Raise more than minimum if you like, but not too much more

Whilst it can be a nice tactic to raise more than the minimum sizing there is also no need to go as large as 2.2x, setting our bet slider options to something like 2.06x is going to save us a lot of Big Blinds in the long term of playing online, for the times we will raise fold or not winning the pot after the flop…

So whilst it seems a little silly to think this will make a big impact, it will over playing thousands of tournaments and there is always a reason the best players in the world use these very small sizings, so let’s emulate the best and see how we fair from it!
changing our open raise size

Raise near 100% of your buttons against unknowns

One of the biggest mistakes of players in low and mid-stakes tournaments is defending poorly from the blinds and not 3-Betting as a re-steal enough against Button raises.

So we need to be playing a huge range of hands from the Button and Q3o is fine to play at least some of the time, because our opponents are just not going to go after the pot enough pre-flop or post-flop, meaning even when they call pre-flop it’s good news for us because we win more money with our C-Bets then.

raise massively wide on button

Find leads in pots where the board is good for us

What does this achieve? Well, we are going to gain the benefit of betting for value against some holdings and protecting our hand as well as turning our hand into a bluff against other hands putting hands like 99-KK in a tough spot in this particular case by leading this turn card.

leading turn cards

Bet A Size which our opponent can call with their weak hands or raise with their Bluffs

OK, so we hit our hand! Great! But now what?

Well we want to get value, so should we just bet huge now and hope our opponent finds a call… well, we could do this against some opponents that don’t seem to care about sizings and are huge calling stations, but unless we have a read that this might be the case, against most players we will want to bet fairly small.

This will allow our opponents to call us with a wider range and even leaves room for the more creative players to bluff raise us.

If we bet large we are never getting bluff raised and our opponent must have a very strong hand to be able to call, so we are very limited in the hands we win more chips from.

river a huge hand
Some great insights from this new training site with very cheap membership compared to other competitors out there right now!

Definitely one that new players would benefit in signing up for rather than paying out over $1,000 in one lump sum!

Do you play on the newly update Party Poker yet?

Constantly putting on the biggest series’ of Poker tournaments and with an ever-growing cash game roster, this age-old site is not one to miss out on…

poker stars casinoGet $30 free SPINS when you Sign up Today with PartyPoker!

The home of some of the biggest online tournament action there is at the moment, with the huge KO series just starting with buy-ins from a few dollars up to $2,100 daily, there is something for all bankrolls here.

A great site if you are looking to put in some volume, offering 40% Rakeback and a great sign-up bonus and having amazing cash games including a Fast-Fold game, Six Plus Hold’em games along with PLO offerings.

Get $30 SPINS tickets