While you can use a lot of the tight-aggressive strategy that you’ve learned up to this point, there are some special strategies that you should employ when you’re playing in an online tournament. The fundamental difference between cash games and tournaments is that once you lose all your chips, that’s it. Unless you’re playing a rebuy tourney, you don’t get a second chance and you’re not allowed a lot of mistakes before your tournament comes to an abrupt halt. Even rebuy tournaments stop allowing rebuys after a certain amount of time. The other big difference is that the blinds increase in tournaments as time goes on. If you’re fortunate enough to go deep into a tourney, just picking up the blinds is a big chunk of chips.

Since the blinds off low, you’re not going to want to do a lot of gambling early on. You should always look at a hand from a risk/reward standpoint. Since the blinds are such a small amount of your total stack, for you to try to bluff preflop carries a high risk (you losing a good size of your chip stack) and a low reward (the small amount of the blinds). Unless you have a really great hand like pocket Aces or Kings, you should avoid getting in all your chips in the early rounds. Even with A-K, you’ll only stay alive about half the time when you’re all-in against a lower pocket pair. Pick up some small pots if you can with good cards early on and stay alive while others are starting to get knocked out. If you can find the right situation, try to double up.

As the blinds begin to increase in subsequent rounds and you’re not getting very many premium hands, you’re going to have to start fighting for your tournament life. If you’re having a cold run of cards or you’re not getting any action on your good hands, then you’re going to have to loosen up your hand requirements some. The blinds start getting so large that folding every hand and getting the blinds taken out every round is going to significantly dent your stack. If you wait much longer, you probably won’t even have much of a stack to compete with. If you’re naturally a tight-aggressive player, you may have to expand your repertoire of playable hands when the blinds start increasing. You don’t play a tournament to survive as long as possible, you play a tournament to win.

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