1 EARLY DOORS

In the early stages of the tournament identify the weak players at your table, and tr y to get involved with them in a few pots.

In terms of starting hand selection it’s best to avoid calling raises with easily dominated hands like A-J, K-Q and K-J as these can get you into a lot of trouble. Small pairs and suited connectors are golden hands early on though, because it’s much easier to know where you’re at in the hand. If you hit a set with a small pair, you know that 95 percent of the time you have the best hand. And once you know that, you can go about building the pot the best way you can.

2 KEEP IT TIGHT

Before the antes kick in there’s no need to go crazy playing too many hands.

It’s probably best to fold hands like K-Q and A-J offsuit in early position. You can still play hands like 6♠-7♠ for deception, but you really need to be careful about playing speculative hands. This factor is mainly dependent on your stack size though – with more chips you can get out of line a bit more.

3 NO SET, NO BET

Stack sizes are one of the most impor tant aspects of MTTs.

For example, a lot of people overvalue pocket pairs with a mid stack. Most online tournaments aren’t very deep- stacked, so unless both the initial raiser and you are deep-stacked, you probably can’t play pocket Sevens profitably to an early position raise.

What people don’t realise with small pairs is that in order to get paid the implied odds, they need to hit their set, still have the best hand (e.g. not be up against a flush, straight or overset), and hope their opponent has a hand that they are willing to go to the felt with.

That’s why small pairs are a lot better early on in a tournament when pots are more likely to be multi-way, because when you do hit your set someone else is likely to have a strong, but most likely second best, hand.

4 RAISE THE RAISER

It ’s a well-known fact that the top multi-table tournament players attack both the ‘final table bubble’ and the ‘in the money ’ bubble.

Bubble play online isn’t nearly as profitable as it once was due to the super-aggressive nature of current online play. Despite this, there are strategies to enable you to take advantage of the bubble (especially in smaller tourneys).

A great way to attack the bubble that isn’t often touched upon is to re-raise other people that are also raising a wide range of hands, or to flat-call in position and mess with them post-flop (this works particularly well if you are deep-stacked).

5 THE EARLY BIRD

When deciding how loose or tight to play at a cer tain table it is widely known that you should try to play the opposite of your table – i.e. tight on a loose table and loose on a tight table.

However, other important factors, such as how much early position raises are being respected, should be considered. If you find your early position raises are being respected by the table, you can raise knowing that mostly you will either take the blinds uncontested, or only have to face someone flat-calling you with the possibility of taking it down on the flop.

In these situations it is possible to loosen up a lot in early position. This strategy will only work well if you play well post-flop, as you will obviously have to play a lot of flops if frequently flat-called. It is also only recommended when there are no short stacks at the table, as you’ll be priced in to calling their shoves with almost any two cards.