- Betting
- Folding
OK hear me out. I know it sounds dumb lol. But as the last quarter of 2024 begins, I am taking stock more comprehensively of my results and strategy this year. And I really think, at least for Multi-Table Tournaments, that it all kinda boils down to these 2 skills.
In tournaments, you sometimes need to bet even when you don’t really “want to,” because the blinds keep going up and you need to win hands to survive. This is obvious.
What may be less obvious is how to do this profitably, but in my experience, during the later stages when everyone is short and blinds are huge, it’s often as simple as “the most active player wins.”
Until that stage however, any bet you place had better be profitable, or you’re just exposing yourself to the chance of busting at a stage when earning more chips doesn’t even directly translate to more profit yet. So in the earlier stages, simply folding a lot CAN be profitable, provided you’re capable of “switching gears” and becoming more aggressive when the blinds get heavy (even off a relatively short stack, which we’re likely to have if we don’t take much risk early).
Especially in lopsided configurations (e.g. top 5 paid, 4 players left, chip leader 100k, everyone else < 15k), folding can sometimes simply be the most profitable play. Here, VPIP’ing with pretty much anything but the very very very best hands is extremely risky; even doubling from 10k to 20k would still put us at a huge disadvantage to the chipleader for 1st place chances - meanwhile, if we just fold, there’s a very good chance someone else will bust very soon, and we can ladder up to 3rd place money.
So, there’s this awesome dialectic between wanting to bet as often as possible—because generally speaking, in MTTs, betting is just kind of good in and of itself—while also recognizing that there is a lot to be gained from mere survival, especially around/after the money bubble.
I now feel like I haven’t said anything at all, but I just typed several paragraphs so I’m not deleting this 