Early in Tournaments. The WSOP Is the Most Famous Poker Tournament in the World. It’s best to play a tighter style in the early stages of these events. A lot of weak players are going to be in the field. Many of these players are going to be on draws. To sum it up: As a new tournament online poker player, your default strategy should be to start out with a tight poker game during the early stage and the middle stage. As the tournament progresses, you can start playing a wider range of hands, possibly even doubling your range during each progressive phase. In this article we’ll cover the tight strategy for the early stages of tournament play from a pro-con perspective. It’s up to you to determine what approach fits best into your game, but hopefully the below will give you a starting point for analyzing whether or not tight really is right for you. In this poker strategy article we share with you some top tips for playing in turbo tournaments on PokerStars. Turbo tournaments offer a fast and fun version of their slower paced regular tournament cousins that can be quite profitable, and in a fraction of the time it takes to win a tournament played at normal speeds.

So in a nutshell, good turbo poker tournament strategy is going to involve good starting hand selection and picking the right spots to move in. It can be pretty frustrating having the risk all your chips so frequently, but it's the way these games are played and how to play them successfully.

In this poker strategy article we share with you some top tips for playing in turbo tournaments on PokerStars.

Turbo tournaments offer a fast and fun version of their slower paced regular tournament cousins that can be quite profitable, and in a fraction of the time it takes to win a tournament played at normal speeds. But how should one adjust to the faster paced structure? In this article I’m going to provide you with some tips for just that.

Patience has its limits.

Early Poker Tournament Strategy Game

There is some merit to a patient approach in tournaments, which leads players to sometimes passing on closer situations to wait for the proverbial “better spot”. This approach is very reasonable in slow, deeper stack structures where those better spots have time to manifest. In turbos, the blinds and antes escalate much quicker and the stacks get shallow much sooner, watering down the value and potency of this approach.

Early Poker Tournament Strategy 2019

Don’t be afraid to gamble early.

Early Poker Tournament Strategy Games

An extension of the above, this doesn’t mean to make wild, bad plays and pray, but rather to not shy away from well calculated risks and push small edges simply because you’re deeper stacked in the early stages. As discussed, those early stages pass much more quickly in turbo tournaments, and the blinds will quickly escalate relative to the stacks. Taking additional risk to stay ahead of that curve and grow your stack is essential.

Look for good resteal spots.

Early Poker Tournament Strategy Odds

We all know that in order to win tournaments, you have to find opportunities to accumulate chips without strong hands. In a fast structure event, the rapidly rising blinds will force players into short stacked all in situations significantly faster than “real hands” come around. This means it’s more important than ever to find and leverage good resteal situations. Facing an open raise that we suspect may be lighter than normal, 3-bet shoving over the top when we hold 8-20bb’s is a very viable play that, when successful, nets you not only the blinds and antes, but the open raise as well. When you’ve open raised yourself and an aggressive opponent has 3-bet you, a 4-bet bluff shove of up to 35 big blinds can be a very viable play that shows massive strength and nets you a nice return and chip up when your light 3-betting opponent folds.