Do you find it hard to make the final table in live poker tournaments? Although poker tournaments can be quite a lot of fun even without making consistent big scores, it’s even more exciting if you pull off deep runs regularly. If you’re a live poker enthusiast, there’s plenty of tools at your disposal to improve your results. For new players, we recommend checking out our guide to poker positions before reading this article further.

Who to ask for advice in case you’d like to do better in live poker MTTs? Well, the apparent answer is players who have a consistent track record in winning tournaments. To help you score higher, we asked professional players at Beasts Of Poker to share their strategies on crush MTTs at your local casino. Here are the five crucial pieces of advice they came up with:

Steal the blinds like a thief

While stealing blinds is a simple concept, it’s under-utilized by most players in your typical live tournament compared to an online tournament. The math behind it is quite simple, actually: If you raise to 2.2 Big Blinds and win the pot outright around half the time, you win more chips on average than you risk. This calculation doesn’t even include the potential you have post-flop to make the best hand or bluff your opponent out of the pot!

Ramp up your aggression once the antes kick in

When a tournament begins, there are usually just the blinds in play to fight for. Compared to starting stacks, they’re very insignificant in size – it doesn’t make sense to go after the blinds aggressively without an excellent starting hand.

On the other hand, your strategy in live tourneys should change as soon as the antes kick in. Now there’s extra blind in the pot to fight for, and you should start re-raising more often pre-flop, especially when you have the position on the original raise. At the middle or late stages of the tournament, every pot begins to matter as the average stacks are usually between 20-40 Big Blinds.

Use push/fold strategy with under 15 Big Blind stack size

A cardinal mistake of inexperienced poker players is limping in to see a flop. While this is rarely a good strategy, even with a big stack, it can be disastrous if you’re short-stacked (unless there are big money jumps in prizes or some other unique situation). It’s very safe to say that most players would be better off using a push/fold strategy when their stack size is below 15BB. This way, you either win the blinds or run a race with someone who calls your shove, giving you two chances to win.

Learn to defend your Big Blind

In the early days of live tournaments, poker players would raise anywhere between 3-5x the Big Blind as an open raise. Playing against a large sizing like that was simple – you waited for a good hand. With modern poker players using a smaller open raise sizing like 2-2.5BB, you get great odds to call in the Big Blind, especially when antes are in play.

How to implement this tip in practice? You can start by calling or re-raising more hands from the Big Blind when the Button or the Cut-off raises and other players have folded. It would be best if you played at least all your pairs, suited aces and connectors, broadways, and decent Ace or King-high hands. Once you start defending wider, your opponents can no longer steal your blinds all the time – and you’ll learn to navigate post-flop!

Work on your game with like-minded players

As we’ve stated before, poker is so much more fun when you learn new nuances of the game that you can put into use at the tables right away. Reading strategy articles like this post or watching poker training videos can be great for your game. Still, there’s one method to improve that is superior to others: Studying poker in a group of like-minded players. The benefits include:

• Constant support from each other.

• Analysing hand histories from different perspectives.

• Learning through finding new strategies together.

Let’s end with a quote from a highly successful poker pro Joni Jouhkimainen, who has cashed over $3.9 million in live tournaments during his career:

‘In my personal experience, the best way to play better poker is the learn the game with your friends. I’ve picked up so many strategies during my career by discussing hands with all the players I’ve met. In fact, I wouldn’t have achieved all the success if I didn’t study poker with like-minded poker friends!’

–Joni Jouhkimainen, partypoker Team Pro & Ambassador at Beasts of Poker

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