Poker Tournament Strategy for Beginners

By Mike Cohen
8-9-06

If you’ve never played in a poker tournament before there is a golden rule for beginners – and that is to play in a tournament! Any tournament. There are plenty of opportunities to play and there is a range of fees and costs involved that can satisfy even the cheapest and most timid of players. If fact, there are so many online poker tournaments that anyone with a computer can join and many in fact can play for free. Without leaving the comfort of your own house or apartment, you can play in almost as many free and extremely inexpensive online poker tournaments as you can possible stay awake for and this is the absolute best way to begin your poker career.

It has been said about sports that most people will never play basketball with Michael Jordan, golf with Tiger Woods or baseball with A-Rod. However, for the sport of Poker, this caveat is most definitely not true. If you can hold your own, if you’ve got enough experience under your belt and if you’ve read and learned a lot about the game there is a good chance that one day you’ll find yourself seated at a final table in some luxurious hotel playing for astronomical amounts of money sitting next to one or more of the Poker Legends. You know who I mean, the guys with the bracelets on their arms, hiding behind a pair of expensive shades or surveying the table with a pair of world weary eyes.

How you get to that star studded final table is pretty much up to you. If you’ve got the cash to burn, drop into any of the many hotel tournaments around the country or around the globe, buy yourself a seat and sit down to play. That’s really all you have to do to get started. Or, if you’re not near a poker playing venue, log onto any one of many online casinos, play for free or pony up the small admission fee and, you’ve heard this before, sit down and play. And I can pretty much guarantee that unless you’re some kind of prodigy you will be eliminated early on in the proceedings.

Here’s how to improve your performance right from the beginning. Play in any tournament, live or online, where the buy in amount is either free or a number that you can lose without caring. That’s where to get started. If you are worrying about the amount you’ve invested in the tournament, you’re not going to play well. Equally true is that if you’re worried about winning the pot, whatever it may be, you’re not going to do well either. All you should be focused on when you start to play in tournaments is a few things: your cards, your chips and the other players.

There are many things to learn and even more to practice when you play. Too many in fact to cover in a short article like this one. However, here’s the best piece of advice you’ll hear anywhere about starting to play in poker tournaments – the best thing you can bring to the table with you is patience. Got patience? Get more. Got even more? Get even more! Once you run out of patience, you’re finished. You have to have the patience to wait for good cards and betting opportunities. Remember, poker tournaments last anywhere from a few hours to a week or even longer if you’re starting out on satellite tables trying to win a cheap seat to an expensive tournament. If you’re trying to make a quick kill, bluffing and stumbling around the table, the more experienced players are going to notice your playing habits and when you make a risky move they’re going to know exactly what you’re doing and they’re going to pounce on you like flies on, uh, whatever. If you read only this article before you play and you have never played before, this is the best advice you’ll need to last as long as you can playing against more experienced players. Patience is a virtue – in poker it’s an absolute necessity! And for beginners, truer words have never been spoken.