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There are many different strategies for approaching the early stages of a tournament. In this week’s tip, Aaron Bartley discusses the implications of being aggressive early in the game.


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The Pros and Cons of Being Active Early
Aaron Bartley
14th January 2009

Deciding how active you want to be at the beginning of a tournament depends heavily on what type of tournament you’re playing in. If it’s a standard Sit & Go, I always recommend playing tight and conserving chips early. If it’s a Multi-Table Tournament or a Shootout Tournament then you should consider a more active style in the early phase.

Part of the goal in doing this is to accumulate chips. But another part of the goal is to establish an image that will help get you chips later. It can be a rewarding way to play, but you need to understand that there’s also a downside to the image this type of play will create.

When you put constant pressure on other players, it’s eventually going to make them fight back. You don’t have to raise large amounts and you don’t have to get involved in huge pots, but by raising with a lot of hands, your opponents are going to play back at you with a wider and wider range of hands. They’re going to start calling and three-betting with more marginal hands, and that’s going to open them up and make them susceptible to giving you their chips more often.

If you’re looking to accumulate chips, you don’t want your table locked down in super-tight mode. You don’t want to have to grind out a few chips every orbit – you want to get into your opponents’ heads and provoke them into spewing chips. You’ll find that once one player at the table does it, it tends to have a domino effect and lead other people to start making mistakes.

The downside, however, is that your bluffs won’t work very often, and that’s something you have to be aware of. For example, let’s say I’ve been playing a lot of pots and developed a loose image in a six-handed table, and I’m dealt A-Q suited under the gun. That’s a good hand at a full table, and it’s even better six-handed. So I make a pot-sized raise, and the big blind calls. The flop is J-10-6, which isn’t exactly a hit for me, but it isn’t a total miss; I have a straight draw and two over cards. I’m going to make a normal continuation bet and I figure my opponent can’t call me without a decent hand. In this case, I bet, he calls and the turn is a three, so I decide to give it one more shot and raise my bet a little bit because I want him to fold. Instead, he calls.

A four now falls on the river. I didn’t hit anything and he’s clearly shown that he’s ready to call anything; I can’t expect to bet him off the hand. In my mind, I’m putting him on a hand possibly as weak as 10-2, but I don’t think I can get him to lay that down, so I check, give up the pot and he wins with 6-7.

Of course I’m going to be a little frustrated to learn that he called twice with third pair. He had to have put me on A-K or A-Q or thought I was raising under the gun with rags and, the truth is, people will begin to think that way because I’ve raised a lot of pots. Because of this, people are going to start calling me extremely light.

In the short-term, that can be a bad thing; but in the long-term, it should be good. If the same hand happens later but I have A-J or Aces or Kings, or even some trash hand that connects, I’m going to get paid off.

This is why the positives of playing an active style early ultimately outweigh the negatives. Even if you lose a pot because your image keeps people hanging around, it can set you up to win an even bigger pot later on.


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