In tournaments these things — blind sizes, antes, stack sizes, and chip values — are all variable, and mastering the changes in strategy due to these changing variables is the key tournament skill. This brings us to today’s question from a reader.

According to your book, Getting Started In Hold’em, the early phase [of a tournament] is regarded as similar to cash games, and the bubble and prize phases are regarded as similar to sit-n-gos (SNGs). Therefore, although my primary focus is on [multitable tournaments], working on my cash game and SNG game would help with my early phase play and bubble and prize phase play, respectively. The middle stage (which you define as average stack of approximately 10 big blinds) is regarded as similar to satellite play. But in tournaments I play, the average stacks are rarely 10 big blinds. They are usually more. If this middle phase exists, I would want to work on satellite play. Should I therefore practice all three games — cash games, satellites, and SNGs — to improve my tournament play?

Well, indeed in live tournaments it’s quite common to have average stacks around the 10BB level after a few rounds. But that actual number isn’t so important.

In Getting Started In Hold’em, I briefly classify tournaments into various stages and discuss roughly what to expect from each stage. The book is written for newer players, and that section is meant only as a rough outline of what to expect. There’s nothing special about 10BB average stacks as opposed to 15BB or 25BB average stacks.

I would say there are two overall changes most multitable tournaments go through, and they both happen gradually as the tournament progresses. First, the average stack sizes drop from the 50BB-150BB range to around the 5-25BB range (depending on the tournament structure). Low buyin live tournaments tend to undergo this change the fastest, but it’s a universal aspect of tournament play. Second, the strategic focus shifts from purely chip accumulation to a balance of chip accumulation and survival.

Generally speaking, when the stacks are deep, your play should resemble cash game play. You’ll be seeing flops and there will be plenty of play after the flop. Often in the first round or two you will see lots of six to eighthanded pots, which you’ll also see in loose, soft cash games.

When the stacks are shallow, your play should still largely resemble cash game play, but it should resemble how you’d play a cash game if everyone started the hand with 10BB instead of 100BB. These stack sizes call for aggressive preflop play, and the preflop open-raise and the preflop shove over a raise are the two bread-and-butter tactics.

Tournament play begins to differ significantly from cash game play once the bubble begins to approach. When the prizes are far off, your main goal should be simply to accumulate chips. Since that’s also your goal in a cash game, the strategies align. Once the bubble nears, however, you must balance chip accumulation against survival, since merely existing at the table now has some value. Also, near the bubble you can take advantage of the fact that many of your opponents might be putting too much emphasis on survival for the sake of taking home one of the small prizes. This factor adds value to aggressive chip accumulating plays.

My model of viewing a multitable tournament as a series of three phases — cash game, satellite, and sit-n-go — is an intentional oversimplification of what’s really going on, but it has some intuitive appeal. Early in the tournament, the prizes are far off, and your goal is to accumulate chips. Since that’s also your goal in a cash game, the stages are similar.

In the middle of the tournament, the stacks are shallower, but your main goal should still be to accumulate chips. In that way the tournament is like a satellite, since satellites usually are winner-take-all (or close to it), and often play with shallow stacks. In a multitable tournament the prizes just after the bubble are small, and therefore while raw survival has some value, it’s not usually worth giving up a chance to accumulate chips just to slide into one of the small prizes. Some players dramatically shift their strategy in and around the bubble to one that highly prizes survival over chip accumulation, and that drastic shift is usually a mistake.

So I would say that the satellite period lasts from the time people start thinking about the bubble to the time the really worthwhile prizes start to come into play.

Then the final stage of the tournament is sort of like the sit-n-go, where surviving one or two places can represent an extra 3 to 5 percent of the prize pool. In this stage chip accumulation is still important, as always, but sometimes survival becomes the more overriding concern.

The bottom line is that most tournament players overvalue survival throughout most of a tournament. The same player who is risk-taking and aggressive in a cash game is cautious in a tournament, even during the middle stages where the prizes are still far off. This isn’t the right way to play! With a few situational exceptions, your primary goal in any tournament hand should be to win chips, not to ensure survival. Remember that early in a tournament you should play like it’s a cash game. And in the middle of a tournament you should play like it’s a satellite. If you do that, your strategic focus will be correct, and you’ll give yourself the best shot to win a top prize.

[This article appeared in the October 21, 2009 issue (Vol. 22, No. 21) of Card Player.]

I think it’s natural to go through this process, and I bet most players do something similar. It’s tempting to focus most on the biggest pots. After all, if that one huge pot had gone a different way, the result at the end of the session would have been much more palatable. Focusing on the big pots isn’t always best, though, because often it’s all the little things we do wrong here and there that set us up for failure.

But it’s certainly smart to review all the big pots for any obvious mistakes. One mistake I see players make frequently in big pots is that they pay off too much. It’s a tricky problem to solve because just because you lose a pot doesn’t necessarily mean that you should have folded. To distinguish bad calls from good calls that didn’t work out, you have to think about the particulars of the hand.

Most bad calls fall into two rough categories. First, people call to try to catch a bluff when a bluff is very unlikely. Second, people call with a hand that looks good, but that is almost always worse than the hands their opponents might be betting. (These categories are not rigid, and they can overlap a lot.) Here’s an example of a call in the first category.

It’s a $2-$5 game. A loose and aggressive player opens for $20 from the second seat. Everyone folds to the button, a tough player, who calls. Both players have roughly $500.

The flop comes Q 6 3 . The loose-aggressive bets $40, and the button raises to $90. The loose-aggressive calls.

The turn is the T . The loose-aggressive player checks and calls a $150 bet.

The river is the 4 . The loose-aggressive player checks and calls an all-in $240 bet with Q J .

This is a bad call. The button has shown immense strength throughout the hand, raising the flop and continuing to bet all streets. Almost no one in the button’s position would be so foolish as to bet this strongly with a hand beaten by Q-J. The most reasonable chance that Q-J might be good is if the button is on a stone bluff. While not impossible, it’s a long shot. The flop is dry, so the button couldn’t have flopped a draw he elected to play hard. It’s not clear exactly what the button might have, but it’s clear enough that Q-J isn’t strong enough to pay off correctly.

Here’s an example of a bad call in the second category.

It’s a $2-$5 game. A player four off the button opens for $20, two players call behind him, and the big blind calls. The flop comes A 9 7 . The blind checks, and the preflop raiser bets $60. Only the button calls.

The turn is the 3 . The preflop raiser bets $100, and the button calls. Both players started the hand with about $1,000.

The river is the T . The preflop raiser bets $100 again, and the button raises makes it $400 to go. The preflop raiser calls with A Q .

While it can be tempting to pay off with the second-best flush, this is likely a bad call. The button has played the entire hand in a way consistent with holding the K , and most players at the $2-$5 level would not make this river raise (particularly with money still behind) without the nut card.

Few players would raise the river for value with a weaker flush, so we’re counting on the button to be either crazy or bluffing to justify a call. Since there’s no evidence to support either possibility, laying down is the right play.

If you were to make a big call like one of these examples and lose, you’d be right to blame your bad session on that one hand. Making big bad calls like these, even occasionally, is a very expensive habit. But it can be easy to beat yourself up after the fact about “bad” calls that weren’t in fact really bad. A call isn’t bad just because you lost the pot. It’s bad because you had little hope to win, and you could have known that from the information available to you at the time.

Here’s an example of another big river call.

It’s a $2-$5 game. A player opens from five off the button for $20. Two players call, and both blinds call. The flop comes J T 6 . The blinds check, and so does the preflop raiser. The next player bets $100. Everyone folds to the small blind, who calls. Both players have about $900 remaining.

The turn is the 4 . The small blind checks and calls $250.

The river is the A . The small blind bets $300, and his opponent thinks for a while and calls.

The small blind shows K Q for the nuts, and his opponent complains about losing with a set, 6 6 .

Even though he lost, the player with the set made a good call. Yes, he should know that K-Q is a real possibility when his opponent bets the river ace. But there are plenty of reasonable alternative hands that his set can still beat. J-T is an example, for flopped top two. Or the small blind could have a hand like A 6 for the flopped nut flush draw and bottom pair. The small blind could also be bluffing. Perhaps he holds a hand like Q 9 or 9 8 . His once-promising draw busted on the river, he decides to take one last shot at winning the pot. In this example, the player with the set knows that he could be beaten, but he also holds out justifiable hope that his set is still tops.

The trick to becoming a better player is to be able to look back on your bad sessions and figure out correctly if you made a big mistake, or if you played fine and the breaks just didn’t go your way. You may be paying off too much. But don’t jump to conclusions. Thinking clearly about the big pots you lose will make you a better player.

[This article appeared in the October 7, 2009 issue (Vol. 22, No. 20) of Card Player.]

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