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How do you manage a poker tournament? With so many live and online poker tournaments be played around the clock there are plenty of opportunities for tournament players. In this article I am going to break down how poker tournaments work and what you need to do in order to not just survive but to position yourself to make a run at the money.

Early in the tournament

I see a lot of players that love to be involved in as many hands as possible. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this thinking when applied in context. However, when applied out of context it can deplete your chip stack and take you out of the poker tournament before it even gets started.

Early on you want to observe and play hands in position unless you have big premium hands. This allows you to slowly accumulate chips while determining whom you will play at and whom to be wary of at your poker table. This does not mean that you must restrict your hands to premium hands only but it does mean that you need to be smart about playing middle and small pairs along with suited connectors and play them in position.

Early in the poker tournament stealing the blinds is fairly meaningless. However, that is not to say that it doesn’t have any affect on the game or the players. If you are able to steal blinds from a player the clearly is not going to defend then you should no matter how early in the tournament it is. But don’t get caught up in it if the steal doesn’t work out. Why waste the chips on the effort when you know the player is a defender?

The bottom line early on in a poker tournament is that you want to double up as quickly and efficiently as possible and look to double up again after that. Once you have achieved that goal you can then expand your game in attempts to see more flops with a larger variety of hand than normal.

Middle Stages

The middle stage of a poker tournament is when you are still grinding away in attempts to build a stack to make a run at the big money later in the tournament. If you are just coming off of break and find yourself about average in chips you need to get going and double up. If you are at least double the average then you are in good shape and can afford to be selective in the hands that you play.

For me this is a critical point in the tournament. You must not allow yourself to get more than one double up away from the average in a fast structure poker tournament. By that I mean if the tournament has levels that are 20 minutes or less then it is a fast structure. This means you will need to get your chips in the middle with [T][T]-[8][8] and [A][K] unless you wait up with a big premium pair.
Your primary mission is to double up. Should you not be so desperate and have a comfortable chip lead over the average stack then you can either open up and play more hands or simply lay back and be more selective. How your table is playing at that particular point in time will dictate just how much you are able to get involved.

Late stages

Now you are in the money. After grinding away for hours you finally can see the “promised land.” For most of getting in the money is not what we are looking for. It is nothing more than a landmark. Now you are looking to have that monster stack going into the Final Table. You should be! The object in any poker tournament is to win it. If you don’t win it all together you want to be in one of the top three spots where most of the money is.

Here is where you are going to have to make some tough decisions. There are two ways you can play when you make the money.

1. Continue to manage your chips carefully and gradually move up.
2. Take risk on flush draws to double up and get there with big chips.

Those are the two ways I see most poker players going when it comes to the money. In a slow structure tournament option 1 is always the best way to go because the blinds are not crashing down on you every orbit nearly as fast. However, if you are playing in a fast structure poker tournament you want to take that risk on the massive double up with the flush draw because you may not see another opportunity for a large double up before the blinds begin to eat your stack away.

Choosing when to take a big draw can be a difficult thing to do but you must learn how to manage that risk. By understanding how to manage the various stages of a poker tournament you put yourself ahead of the pack and increase your chances of winning it.

That’s a good place to be.

Curtis Mayfield III