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POKER TOURNAMENTS HAND EXAMPLES 2
Example Three:
You: Ac - Jd
Flop: Jh - Th - Ts
So this is a hard hand, and a lot may depend upon your position and what your adversaries do. Near the final table, you look at pushing all in, but this is the starting time of a long tournament, not the end.
Here it appears like such a fine hand, but you have a flush chase, and tens are good cards, meaning weaker players will play Q-10, K-10, or A-10 — all which bankrupt you right now.
Also, don’t put it past some moron to be playing 8-9. Q-K can be life-threatening, too!
If a player ahead of you bets strong, and one goes all in, you muck. There is an effective chance he has a weaker jack, but early on you need to survive, and that stands for you not taking the chance of fighting trips, or having a heart, queen, nine, or freak Q or K (for a player holding J-Q or Q-K) to break you.
That’s almost 1/3 of the deck, and with two cards to catch. Throw it away and wait for a better chance — you may lose a hand here or there you would have won, but you’ll live on in the Tourney while the wilder players may surge, but they’ll lose those chips later again, you can bet on that.
Encountering a Maniac Early:
This is an issue that can drive a normally solid tight aggressive player
crazy early on. These are the players everybody loves to hate.
Particularly if the maniac seems to be raking in a lot of chips, and catching enough breaks to double and triple up.
In a cash game, isolating such a lunatic is a great strategy because you recognize that if you do it long enough, you will have a large number of strong hands fighting his large number of weak hands — and eventually the math will work irresistibly in your favor.
The problem that maniacs cause in a multi-table tournament is that if they double up once, they now have the power to put everybody out.
In a cash game all you had to do was re-buy.
In a (freeze-out) tournament if that bastard hits a five while holding A-5 and your A-K misses... well then that’s it you are done, statistics be damned!
In a multi-player tournament there are a couple of things to remember, especially in the beginning (which should be the only time you come across these players unless a truly bizarre series of events turn out).
Only chase the maniac with superior hands.
In cash games moderate level hands are acceptable because the maniac will play numerous genuinely bad hands, but when one hand can eliminate you, do you really want J-9 suited or 6-7 suited to be the hand you make a stand with?
Even something like A-8 suited gives the maniac a coin flip of a chance, and one of the huge rules for dominating a multi-player tournament is to not gamble.
If you’re going after the madman, you want a hand that will dominate even the mediocre hands. This gives you the best chance of doubling up — at which point unless you are dealt a dominant hand, it’s time to sit back and sit on your extra chips like a hen on her eggs.
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