Tournament Advice Poker is basically played for the money. Of course, there are players who play it for fun and kicks rather than money itself, but still they need to pay if they fail to be long-term winners. Most rookies consider poker a great and glamorous opportunity for earning huge sums of money with little effort, but you need to know one thing: glamorous is the one thing winning poker isn't. Winning poker feels just like losing poker. Winning poker is the exploitation of tiny little edges over and over again, winning poker is hard work day after day, with nothing glamorous about it. It is a widely accepted fact that money is in tournaments. That may well be the case in online poker, but in live poker tournaments are just as hard to work as regular ring games. You just can't get enough action ( you need hours and hours of play to squeeze out an edge in poker) or you can, but then you need to travel a lot and travel doesn't come cheap. Whenever you consider your poker winnings you need to subtract all the expenses you have on the road. All that is basically part of the rake. Beating all these tourneys doesn't look all that bright now, does it? Online poker is different, of course. There are no expenses with the transportation, and some of these tourneys can be entered completely free. ( of course you need some superhuman luck to go with your superhuman skill to win one of these tourneys ) Free tournaments are so wildly popular there are often 1700 people or more doing battle for a meager $500 prize-pool. Real-money buyin sit-n-go tourneys are different, though. This is where you can actually get your hands on the money. What exactly do you know about tournament strategy? Do you suppose it goes down the same way as a regular ring game? Better think again. At the beginning of a tournament, extra tight play is required. You need to get rid of all the maniacs, rookies and fish who are in the game. Maniacs are usually of two types: first type, is the kind of maniac whose only goal is to ruin other people's game. He never intends to win or even to make it ITM. The only effective weapon against these anarchists is patience. All you need to do, is wait it out till they beat themselves, which is bound to happen sooner rather than later. The other type of maniac is actually a good player. He does the all-in thing in the beginning to see how lucky he gets. If he builds up a big enough bankroll he will cool own later and start playing reasonably. This is the dangerous type of maniac. There's really no effective weapon against him but hoping that he never gets too lucky. Any way you look at it, by the mid stages of a tourney, the roster will be maniac-free. They'll either be calm by then, or gone altogether. The tightness will no longer pay, since the bigger bankroll will always intimidate and ultimately devour smaller ones. You need to start seeing some flops, and you need to become more aggressive. If your aggressiveness pays out, and you boost your chip-stack substantially, you should, again, sit back a bit and tighten up. If you make it to the final table, you need to adopt a strategy you usually use for short handed games. That strategy should be an extra-aggressive one. This is the time when you should attempt something you shouldn't do in poker under any other circumstances: attempt to win every single reasonable hand. Good players usually thrive under such conditions, so if you are faced with one ( and you're sure to be faced with a good player at the end of a tourney ) you'd better whip your short-handed play into top condition, too.