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Single-Table No-Limit Texas Holdem Tournaments

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Single-table No-Limit Texas Holdem tournaments, also referred to as sit-and-go tournaments is an incredibly popular form of Texas Holdem tournaments available in all top online poker rooms recommended by our site. Sit-and-go tournaments are also popular in land-based casinos and usually these are satellites to MTTs (multi-table tournaments) played in a winner-takes-all style. However, this article is about most popular form of STTs (single-table-tournaments) played in online poker rooms, where the first place gets 50%, second – 30% and another 20% are taken by third place. If you are planning to play in a winner-takes-all STT, then you will probably need to apply slightly different and much more aggressive strategy than the one discussed in this article.

Well, let’s get to business. First of all, at the beginning of the sit-and-go No-Limit Texas Holdem tournament you should tend to see fewer flops. You can frequently limp in, even holding speculative hands such as low pocket pairs like 4 of clubs and 4 of spades and you should definitely raise with strong hands like high pairs, but you shouldn’t see the flops, when holding something average-to-poor (for example just suited cards).

In the cheapest buy-in single-table No-Limit Texas Holdem tournaments there are plenty of weak players that’ll quickly waste their money during first several rounds. If you’ll be lucky to hit a truly strong hand, then there is a decent chance that one of your opponents will pay you off a good slice of his stack.

Now, when several stages of the tournament passed, you shouldn’t still see a lot of flops. Fold preflop, unless you hold something worthy. Nevertheless, if the pot is frequently raised, then you’ll need to play tighter preflop.

Once the big blind is about 10% of your starting stack and therefore you’ve reached the middle stages of a single-table No-Limit Texas Holdem tournament, your goal is to focus on stealing the blinds. Except for a few cases, you should mostly raise, if you’re the first to enter the pot (none of your opponents has called or raised the big blind yet). A typical raise in this situation will be a raise worth 3 or 4 big blinds.

A good example of a particular situation, where you may just limp in is when you have AA in early position and want to persuade one of your opponents to raise after you and then re-raise your opponent all-in, when the action gets back to you again.

During the middle stages of the single-table No-Limit Texas Holdem tournament and later, the gap concept comes into play a bit more. Literally, there is a certain gap between the lower hand strength that is actually needed to open a pot and the higher hand strength, which is sufficient to call a player, who raised. This purports that blind stealing is quite effective.

You should generally tend to enter a pot, if none of your opponents had already called or raised the pot, because if they did, then they likely have strong hands. That is the reason for the difficulty of stealing the blinds and it is more likely that your hand will be challenged. Hence, if one or more of your opponents have already entered the pot, you must be more selective with your cards.

During the later stages of the tournament, most action will normally occur preflop. At this point you will appear in one of the following situations:

1. You are short in stack. Say, you can afford just about five big blinds. In this case the worst thing would be blinding yourself to a complete loss. At this point, stealing blinds should mean much to you, and the worst thing you want to do is to see a flop by investing a half of your entire stack and fold. Therefore you should consider going all-in with an Ace plus any high card, or any (even low) pair preflop (unless none of your opponents had bet for a lot already). You should also consider going all-in in late position, when holding any two cards of 10 or higher if no one prior to you had entered the pot. Your goal is to survive and get into at least 3 rd place.

2. You have an average stack. Try to collect more chips slowly. Avoid aggressive confrontation, except if you hold the nuts or near-nuts. Remember that your goal is to win the tournament, because it’s better to win one sit-and-go than come third in two of them.

3. You have a huge stack. In this case your goal is to hunt and threaten the rest of players. For instance, if you have 10,000 chips and your opponent has 3,000 chips, while the blinds are worth 300-600 chips, then your goal is to aggressively steal the blinds. Don’t be foolish, but be reasonably aggressive and your opponents will be scared of calling you, since they will try to sneak into the money. Make your position solid and try to win the tournament.

If you plan to become a frequent single-table No-Limit Texas Holdem tournament player, then you should start keeping track of your game statistics. This way you can easily compare your success at different buy-in levels and therefore choose tournaments that match your style of play.

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