Your Guide to Making Online Poker Profitable

Multi-Table Tournament Games

Choosing a Tournament

Keep in mind that no matter how good you are, you will not always end up in the money in a large tournament.  Bad luck, bad beats, and dumb players will knock you out sometimes.  If you play well, you may be able to make money on perhaps 10% of the tournaments you play in, and make the final table (and usually make a fairly good amount) on perhaps 5% of the tournaments you play in.  So plan accordingly.  Play those tournaments which cost you only 5% (maybe 10%) or less of your total stack.  Look for guaranteed prize pool tournaments, they will attract more players, including more bad players, and if for some reason a lot of players do not sign up, your odds of making money go up in relation to the amount you put in.  Bounty tournaments (tournaments where you can earn a certain amount each time you knock someone out) also attract more players, so they are often a better choice, plus you can earn back some of your buy-in if you knock out other players.

Multi-Table Tournament Strategies

To a large extent, the strategies for a Sit and Go Tournament apply for multi-table tournaments, with a few exceptions:

1.   Luck plays a bigger factor – The more players there are, the more luck is involved, especially early on.  Just look at the World Series of Poker.  As the number of players increased dramatically the last few years, the fewer professionals made it to the final day.  Because luck is more involved, there will be many more players who take chances now and then, and you should also consider taking more chances and being more aggressive at certain times.

2.   Play will be crazier – The more players there are, especially if there are re-buys (a re-buy is when a tournament allows you to buy more chips if you lose some or all of your original stack), the more players that will play almost crazy aggressive, especially early on.  If you can catch one of these guys in a trap you can get paid nicely.  As the number of players decreases (or when the re-buy period ends), the more normal play will get.

3.   Chip stack size matters – The size of your chip stack and the size of the stacks around you matter more in a multi-table tournament.  You need to build a big stack in order to be able to compete in the later stages.  Stack sizes will get very large for some players, and very small for others.  You will need to be more careful against the large stacks, and take advantage of the small stacks.  Eventually, the blinds will get large, and there will even start to be antes, so you will need to play according to your stack size in relation to others.  If you have a large stack, you can sit back and wait for the big hands, and bully the small stacks when you sense weakness.  If you have a short stack, you will need to use selective aggression and even bluff at times in order to steal blinds and small pots in order to stay alive.

4.   Patience is important – In a tournament of 100 players, it will take at least 3 hours to play if you make it to the final table.  It can get very tedious and even boring at times, so plan to play these tournaments only when you have the patience and stamina to play them all the way through.  The more the tournament progresses, the more that skill comes into play, so you need to be sharp when you make it to the later stages.

5.   Make notes – While you should make notes on other players in any game, it is especially important in a multi-table tournament.  You will be on a table with some players for a long time, and players will move around, so any information you can gather about another player early on will be extremely valuable later if you find yourself up against them again.

6.   Re-Buys – Re-buy tournaments are quite different than normal tournaments during the re-buy period, and they need to be played differently.  The most common re-buy tournaments allow unlimited re-buys during the first period (the period until the first break, usually an hour), when your chip stack is at or below your starting amount.  They may also offer a double re-buy (you can buy double the initial amount), which is a good idea, especially at the beginning of the tournament, mainly because if you get involved in an all-in situation, you can win a lot more chips.  Hint: At UltimateBet, the site will seat you prior to the tournament start, and you will be able to re-buy at this point, but you will only be allowed a single re-buy.  But if you wait until the tournament starts, you can double re-buy, so you start out at 4500 chips while many others start at 3000. 

During the re-buy period, there will be very aggressive play, with a lot of all-ins, even with marginal hands.  The reasoning is that if you win, you’ll build a big stack, and if you lose, you just re-buy and start again.  The cheaper buy-in tournaments will see more of this type of behavior.  I’ve seen someone go all-in every hand to start the game, constantly losing and re-buying.  Eventually, almost the whole table called him on one of these all-ins, he hit a big hand, and was suddenly the big stack at the table, then played tight from then on.  Of course, he spent 5 to 10 times more than everyone else, but he was also in a great position to go far in the tournament.  I wouldn’t recommend this strategy, but it should illustrate how being aggressive and gambling a bit during this period can pay off.  The goal in a re-buy tournament is to accumulate the biggest stack you can before the re-buy period ends.  At the end of the re-buy period, you may have an option to add-on, which allows you to buy 1 or 2 times the amount of your original stack no matter what your stack size is at the time.  If you are around the middle or higher in stack size vs. the entire tournament, then it is worth adding on.  If you have a very small stack, consider how you’ve been playing in order to decide whether to add on.  If you have the opportunity to add on with double, do it.  Most everyone else will, so if you don’t you will lose position in the tournament without even playing a hand.

Keep in mind that with a double re-buy at the beginning, and a double add-on at the end of the period, you will need to commit a minimum of 5 times the initial buy-in in order to be competitive.  So choose a table with a buy-in small enough that you can afford at least 5 or more buy-ins with ease.

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