All the right moves

What’s your objective when you enter a poker tournament? I mean, beyond kicking back, having some fun and busting out like a hero with a beer-fuelled bluff.

Well, I don’t know about you, but mine is to win it. And I’m sure that before the shuffle- up-and-deal most people would probably say the same. However, somewhere along the way that goal becomes distorted by trying to sneak into the money.

Now naturally, we all want to win the big prize, but often it’s all too easy to revert to survival tactics (i.e. folding) and to just ‘put up a good showing’.

The fact is that most players who enter tournaments are too worried about busting out when they should be focused on accumulating chips. Poker tournaments reward volatility. As all the money is biased towards the top three or four places it’s often better to bust early several times and hit one big prize than it is to hit several small prizes just after the bubble.

Given all of this, if you want to be a lifetime tournament winner you need to be able to make the moves that will gather chips and provide you with the big stack to pressurise opponents too worried about their ‘tournament life’.

This is a two-stage process. The first is changing your mindset and becoming more aggressive. The second is knowing how to put this aggression into action. So I’m going to take you through three common bluffs and plays you can make that will see you go deep in multi-table tournaments.