Hello there, class, and welcome to the continuation of our lesson on tournament poker! In the last lesson, we looked at the beginning stages of poker tournaments. Now we’ll take a look at the crucial middle stages, before moving on in our next lesson to the concluding stages of acing the tournament. Let’s get right to it:

The middle stages

In the middle stages of a poker tournament, the blinds will continue to increase and, therefore, will start to represent an increasing proportion of your stack. For this reason, simply winning the blinds becomes important. If you’re first into the pot, you should consider entering with a raise; quite often you can steal the blinds, since your opponents will be risking a large proportion of their stack by calling your raise.

The flip side of this is that you must tighten up your requirements for calling, and when you do bet into a pot you have to play aggressively. Unless you are winning pots with some regularity you will quickly find your stack shrinking, so try to win the blinds once per round. This way you can see another round of hands and increase your chances of hitting that premium hand.

Also, at this stage of the tournament, your stack size starts to become important. If your stack falls below roughly four times the upper limit, you can expect to be called a lot more often. That’s because your stack is not large enough to seriously damage the larger stacks at the table, and your opponents know that you are being forced into playing slightly more marginal hands. Combat this by raising only with premium hands and limping in with reasonable hands. You should also lower your calling requirements when you are short-stacked, since you never know if a better opportunity will come along.

If you have twice the average stack size or more, you are in a strong position. However, this can change rapidly as the blinds quickly add up, so don’t let your guard down. You need to keep playing aggressively, especially with the short stacks, but be careful of the other large stacks at the table as they can do you serious damage.

If you find yourself head-to-head with a player who is almost all-in, you should force the other player to commit their last few chips at the first opportunity. After they’ve made a bet, you should bet instead of call in order to prevent them from checking—knocking that player out will bring you one step closer to the money. However, as always, play with care as no matter how few chips a player has left, they can quickly regain a commanding position in just a few hands if they hit some fortunate draws.

Best of luck and, remember, practice makes perfect.