Winning texas hold em

For those of you hoping that winning texas hold em will be easy, well think again. There is no real winning, as the game never ends. Granted you can win a tournament, but once you win, well you have to play again to prove that your victory was genuine. Look at Phil Hellmuth, he’s won quite a few bracelets, and yet he continues to play. He wins some tournaments, loses others. He may win a tournament here and there, he may win some money here and there, but he never has truly won the war.

The game can’t end. It’s just a series of battles. You can win the hand, you can win the tournament, you can win the sit n go, but you have to keep playing.

The secrets to winning tournaments

If you want to win a tournament, you have to play smart. Unlike cash games, you cannot buy back in during a tournament. Well, in rebuy tournaments you can but that’ll cost you more money, and well, you’ll be at a disadvantage in chip stack size because your opponents now have more chips than you.

In a rebuy tournament you can play more aggressively in the beginning because the stacks won’t be much larger than yours if you buy back in during the first or second round. In a no rebuy tournament you have to play smart, and pick your spots.

Being that the size of the blinds is small relative to your stack in the beginning it may be tempting to play a lot of hands. In a no rebuy tournament this is a terrible idea. You want to save your chips for when the pots get bigger. If you’re playing every flop at 10 / 20 well, after about 10 hands you just lost 200 chips, and that’s if you fold every time someone at the table bets. If your starting stack was 2,500 chips, you just lost about 1/12 of your stack just trying to see flops.

In tournaments where the blinds increase every 10 – 15 minutes, those 200 chips come in handy. You just want to pick up a good hand here and there and take down a nice sized pot. Typically the “bad” players are trying to amount a good amount of chips in the beginning, or bust themselves out. Let them. Don’t get involved. They’ll be playing hands they shouldn’t and the odds just go right out the window. Who knows, they may pick up a lucky flop against your good hand, and being that you can’t believe anyone would possibly call with such a bad hand, you ignore and bet, losing your chips.

This is why I refuse to play a lot of hands in the beginning. I let the bad players go out then take the chips of the decent players. Decent and great players are more predictable than bad players. Bad players don’t know how to play, so remember that. If you spot a bad player wait until you have the nuts then take them out. If you don’t have the nuts they may outdraw you. Outs go out the window when you’re only playing a few hands. I know some may not agree with me on that, but I’ve seen bad players hit straight flushes and win hands when they didn’t even know what they were going for.

Around round 3 or 4 most of the ‘bad” players should be out so you can start playing a typical game of poker at this point. Pick your spots, bluff, and play the way you would against someone who knows what they’re doing.

If there’s still bad players in the game, well, my suggestion is to avoid them. In tournaments you can’t afford a bad beat, just plain and simple. This is why Hellmuth rants and raves so much on TV. He knows you can’t take a bad beat in a tournament, especially early, if you want to survive and win. Remember, avoid the bad players early and you’ll be winning texas hold em tournaments in no time.