Making Moves in Tournament Poker

It is a well known fact that there can only be one winner of a poker tournament. Even if the players themselves do some kind of a deal then there can still only be one winner. But  every single player irrespective of skill or experience understands this very simple fact. They also understand just how few hands a player gets in an average online poker tournament in which to try and accumulate chips.

But what the vast majority of players do not do is play in such a way as to try and amass as big a stack as they possibly can as quickly as they can. To win a poker tournament you need two factors working in your favour. You need the ability and the know how to be able to take advantage of situations when they arise and you also need to get lucky.

The concept of luck is massive in tournament poker and is the one deciding factor in who wins any one particular tournament. But novice tournament players simply wait for good hands to come their way and hope that they get them in enough quantity. This is an illusion as it never happens or it happens so rarely as to not be worth talking about.

So if you don’t get enough quality hands to win poker tournaments then how can you possibly win one of them? The answer is that you must be constantly looking for ways to pick up easy pots. One such play is the pick up play and here is an example. You are in the big blind with the Q-9 although actually the hand is of little importance in this situation.

Three players limp in for 400 and the small blind completes so there is 2000 in chips in the pot. Each player has a stack of 10,000 so each player can afford to pass. You make a big re-raise to 3000 and everyone folds. Your stack increases by 20% from 10,000 to 12,000 and all because you had the nerve to make a move at the right time when all your opponents appeared weak.

Your opponents obviously did not want to play a big pot and were merely trying to see a cheap flop with speculative hands. Do not be afraid to make plays like these and have them go wrong because at the end of the day, you have to amass all of the chips in play to win the tournament anyway.