In this post we will look at some No Limit-Hold’em Poker Tournament spots, we will describe each play and why we make these moves. All these examples are taken from one of the best tournaments on 888Poker the $33 Big Fish, with qualifiers from just a few dollars and a soft field, this is a good game to set your sights on taking down.
Don’t get too tricky
If you have a huge hand and your opponent wants to play for more chips, just re-raise them small pre-flop, this will allow them to make even more mistakes by either calling or moving all-in.
This is a hand where we opened from UTG+2 with Aces, we get 3-bet from the Cut-off and the UTG limper flat calls that bet, even with Aces we are not going to want to take a flop three ways, we want to put more money in here and look to get it heads up with one of the players. So we decide to make a small 4-bet to try to induce an all-in.
As it ends up, we have a cooler on our hands, our opponent finds the 5-bet jam preflop with Kings and we hold with our pocket Aces, however, this is another point, let’s say we had flat called pre-flop to get tricky and now the flop is Ace high, our opponent is not going to risk their whole stack with an Ace on board, so we would lose value, it’s important to get all the money in when your opponent has nothing to be scared of and play for max value.
Isolate weak limpers with good equity hands
In this pot, we see some weak limps from early position, so we decide with our suited KQ to bump up the price and look to isolate one of these limpers with our range advantage…
With certain holdings a little more weak than this one, we could look to limp behind, like small pairs 22-88 or weaker connectors like 89s for example, but this hand rates to have our opponents in bad shape so we want to play for more money and get a better chance of winning the pot by getting more players out of contention with a raise…
C-Bet small on boards where we have the range advantage
Although we are not in love with this board we have to take a stab at this flop, we will have all hands like 99, TT, AA, A9s, ATs whilst our opponent can only really have a hand like T9s or a weak Ace with holdings like A4o that might limp and call a raise.
So with that in mind and good back door equity with cards like a heart giving us a flush draw and hitting a Jack to make a broadway straight, we take a small stab at the pot.
This will allow us to see all five cards for a cheap price when our opponent calls and checks the turn, which is likely outcome…
That’s exactly what happens in this pot, our opponent check calls with their open ender, we check back the turn this time, I think betting sometimes to apply pressure is fine too.
We end up rivering our gutshot and getting all the money in as our opponent makes a straight too. This is why we look to play against weaker holdings and isolate limpers!
Look to Avoid Marginal Spots
In this pot, we see a lot of action against our strong hand of pocket Tens, but it’s very tough for us to continue in this pot, we aren’t getting the right price to just call and hit a set, cold 4-betting seems like a disaster as we are going to run into hands like JJ-AA and sometimes AKs only, so our only option with stack depths the way they are is to make a disciplined fold.
Too many players would just flat call here and get in trouble either way, as if the board comes with over-cards it’s impossible to want to continue and if the board comes all low cards and our opponent has a better pair than us we will lose a big pot when we get stubborn… so folding pre-flop is a good way to play the hand very easily, just look for a better spot!
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