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Worst Poker Tournament Moves

Winning a poker tournament requires a different skill set than winning during a cash game. This is one of the reasons that top cash game players are not the same group of people who tend to win tournaments.

You’ll often hear players talking about making moves to win poker tournaments. The right moves will help you make the final table frequently. The wrong moves will ensure you seldom cash. Below you will find a list of the worst tournament poker moves you can make. Avoid them to improve your odds of winning more often.

Blinding Off

This is the worst thing to do in a tournament. Your chip stack is your tournament life. People who blind off tend to be scared money. They might be under rolled for the event and are looking to min-cash. The problem with this method is that over the long run you will end up losing money. You need to win more than double your entry to make up for all of the times you end up losing.

When you play in a tournament, especially in any of the big bet games like No-Limit Hold’em, blinding off is deadly. Losing fold equity is devastating to your tournament life. If you are down to 5 big blinds you cannot adequately put pressure on someone with 50+ big blinds. So you will end up getting called in many spots. You want to preserve fold equity. Getting below 15 big blinds in a tournament is not a good idea. You should be shoving before that point arrives.

Chasing Draws

This is not a great idea in cash games unless you are really deep stacked, but it is a terrible idea in tournaments. If you are going to call half your stack to chase a flush in a cash game you always have the ability to reload. This is not the case with a tournament.

Chasing draws tends to be bad, unless you are getting a very good price. However, even if the price is right, chasing can be wrong. If you are getting odds to chase a flush, but if you miss you would be down to an M of under 10 then it might be best to shove all-in.

Limping Late

Open limping is fine early on in a tournament. This is especially the case when you hold a speculative hand such as a pocket pair. If you make a raise and the entire table comes along then it might be better to simply call. Later in the tournament, however, this is a bad idea. You have to remember that your chips are worth more later on in a tournament than they are early.

Raising Too Much

The standard raises used to be 2.5x or 3x the big blind but varies nowadays depending on the game and the table conditions. However, some players go too bid with their raises when trying to steal blinds

If you raise too much, you’re opening yourself up to some tricky spots. For example, if you raise 10x with A-10 suited from the cutoff and get a call from someone on the button, you’re now going to be first to act the rest of the hand. What do you do when the button decides to re-raise you?

The trick is to raise enough to force players out of the pot but not too much to put yourself into a tricky situation on the flop and beyond. Generally, you will be able to establish a raising range within a couple of levels but until you do, be careful of raising too much.

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