Early Levels Matter!Ī number of players - including some who are very successful in tournaments - maintain the early, pre-ante levels of most tournaments simply don't matter.

We'll organize the discussion under a few different headings, the first having to do with a common misconception about the initial levels of a tournament. In most MTTs, these are the levels when there are blinds but no antes, and when stacks start out relatively deep in terms of how many big blinds they represent. Today we'll focus on the early levels of a multi-table tournament, by which we're referring to just the first two or three. Then the final table introduces its own special considerations - including what are usually significant changes in payouts coming with each elimination - that should further affect your strategy. Once the bubble bursts and the play for real money begins, they change again.

Priorities change as you proceed from the start of a tournament to the middle stages to the pre-bubble and bubble periods. It's a similarly big mistake to play the early levels of a tournament the same way you'd play the middle or later stages, and vice-versa.

It's a big mistake to play a no-limit hold'em tournament the same way you might play a cash game. We've covered some of the broader concepts affecting multi-table poker tournament strategy so far, including how tournaments differ from cash games, the importance of stack sizes in tournaments, and how the objectives of chip accumulation and survival work alongside each other in tournaments.įrom here let's begin to talk more specifically about tournament strategy as it changes from the first levels all of the way through to the final table - that is, how your approach should evolve and adapt as you move through the different 'stages' of a tournament.

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