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Near The Money Tournament Strategies

What makes close to the money tournament strategy different?

If the tournament is a freeze-out, which means you are out when your chips goto 0, your chips become more valuable as time goes on.

In tournaments you do not make the same plays as you would in ring games. For instance, you might call A4 suited in a ring game, but in a tournament its a common fold (with certain assumptions).

With tournament play, people will draw for their hands less than they would during ring games because they want to last as long as possible to make "the money." If you are good enough to make the money then you will be getting paid from this point going forward depending on how long you last. This is key. How long you last in the tournament, determines the amount of money you make. This is why the value of your chips is important as time goes on.

With this in mind. You now know that playing ring games is a different strategy altogether. The bets and calls have different reasons behind them.

As time goes on, blinds increase forcing you to shift your strategy. Stack sizes also affect your strategy as well. If you do not maintain a reasonable chip stack, the blinds will eventually catch up to you stack and you will be forced all in from the blinds.

The basic principles are:
1. Big stacks push little stacks to steal blinds.
2. Little stacks make agressive risky plays often with inferior cards.
3. Play to win or play to be in the money.

You can smell the money

Here are some sample strategies you can utilize during your tournament play if you are fortunate enough to be close to being in the money.

Steal from the middle man

Assumptions: You have a large stack; You are able to raise the blinds by 3-4x without it hurting your stack if you had to throw it away or call an all in from a smaller stack; "The money" is 1-5 spots away.

We recommend pushing the medium stacks at this point. If you push the small stacks they are more than likely to go all in and the risk is higher that you will have to utilize more of your chips than neccessary.

Since you are not gauranteed victory, you can easily lose alot of chips right before the money. Not a good thing. The medium stacks are likely not to play games with the larger stacks because they know they can easily make "the money" if they just play conservatively. So if you're a big stack and you're in this position, push the medium stacks and get rewarded.

David beat Goliath

Assumptions: You are one the smaller stacks left in the tournament; Your all in bet will cover more than two big blinds; The money is 1-5 spots away.

Make aggressive moves against the large stacks and the medium stacks. However, I think you need to be more wary of the medium stacks here. The medium stacks usually respect the big stacks, but do NOT respect people that are about to taste the rail.

Psychologically every big stack knows they don't want to get into all in pots if they don't have to. They want to protect what they worked so hard to gather.

Conclusion

So if you're small, hit the big. If you're big, hit the middle man.