There is no one specific strategy to winning poker, but there is an inherent truth to poker strategy in general, and that is: Know as much about your opponents as you can gather, and use thier weaknesses against them.
Poker Strategy Learning The Right Timing.
Professional players talk about it all the time. It's about having good timing in a tournament for a bluff, a re-raise, a squeeze play, a tough fold or an all-in call. But having good timing isn't really something you learn about away from the table, it comes with hours and hours and buy-in after buy-in as part of your dues paid on the felt.
In that sense it is hard for amateurs and even more so for new players to emulate the good timing of their favorite professional players often exhibited in big-money, televised tournaments like the WSOP and WPT. Certainly there is a level of intuition involved that comes from talent, experience, patience and just a knack for reading opponents. None of this will come easy for a new online player, but there are strategies a rookie can learn to use while building his skill and bankroll so that eventually, a sense of timing is a natural part of arsenal.
Profiling. Learn to profile your opponents in every tournament, at every table you are at. By profiling I mean using a color system (if you don't have software), or profile icons (like the ones used in tournament indicator), to identify and predict the motives and moves your opponent may make, even before he makes them.
Putting your opponent on a hand. This is something that you absolutely must try to do whether you are in a hand or not. When you can put your opponent on a range of hands, 3 of 4 times, you will start to see the benefits of this through well-times bluffs, pushes, and calls. It takes practice. Lots of practice, but you are going to experience some pure poker joy when your opponents start flipping over the exact hole cards you thought he had. And it WILL happen! Knowing the Tournament Structure. Not just knowing, but understanding is probably better stated. What is the payout and how far from the money are you? When are the blinds going up? How is the structure affecting the play of others?
Understanding your M and Q. If you don't know these, in particular your M and thus your MZone, you have very little chance to make well timed plays in poker tournaments As your M becomes more critical, as with your opponents' M, there is far less predictability about anyone's play and this must factor in to your decision making.
The next time you see a professional on TV make a well timed play, not only has he used in intuitive experience, but also has calculated these factors above to help support his decision. So learning these and making them part of your game, every game, is where you need to start.
Poker Strategy for Using Software
There has been a lot of tools introduced for the poker market that allows players to get a good look into the betting patterns and overall style of their opponents. This type of information can be quite useful for strategizing in ring and no limit games but software designers have had difficulty in using the same type of data for tournament analysis.
It hasn't been for not trying, because several software products can handle tournament statistics but users of such software can be easily misled by those results. The reason for this is because betting and activity statistics cannot accurately include other dominant factors in tournaments that demand further analysis.
Is poker strategy all about knowing how to play Poker? You might think so, as that would sit well with most card games, but poker is different - it's about you and mind as it is about anything else. The poker mind is your biggest weapon, and combining that with online poker strategy can make you a fomridable player in a relatiely short time.
Let's take for example you have an opponent you have tracked for 23 hands with a VPIP of 43% and aggression factor of 3.5. Well if these stats were collected during a single table cash game with 9 players, then you have likely run into a maniacal player more commonly identified in ring games as a loose-aggressive (LAG). Now granted 23 hands isn't a clear indicator, but you at least know he isn't a mouse.
Now how about if those same statistics were collected during a multi-table tournament? On the face of it, your first impression may be exactly the same - the dude is wild. However if you are looking at these stats in a poker assist software program like Poker Tracker, Poker Prospector or Poker Sharpener, what you may not realize is that none of those programs can tell you the tournament dynamics at the time you collected those statistics.
What difference does that make? Well there are overwhelming factors in tournaments which can turn a mouse into a jackal, and elephant into a mouse, and an eagle into a monkey. Furthermore, changing your overall game plan as a result of these factors can very well be the correct play given the circumstances.
Let's take our player again but also note that the tournament was in the middle stages where he was orange mzoned, still a ways to go before any money and he had some tight players to his left that gave up the blinds and/or even worse continually folded to his flop bet no matter what they had. Right there, if you are NOT aggressive NTM and in the orange mzone, then you likely aren't playing optimally.
The way your opponent is feeling at a given moment in a tournament is largely difficult to ascertain when reviewing indicators like VPIP and AF after the fact, but that is also one of the strongest indicators you can have during the game.
This is one of the reasons that the only poker calculator on the market specifically designed for tournaments actually tracks and displays the truly valuable indicators you can really use in a tournament to make decisions. The VPIP and AF are only a small part of the story because in poker tournaments you also need the current M, the tournament stage, the payout structure, how much your opponents' stacks have changed recently, how many hands has he gone without a win, and many more nuances that when combined with a little experience you won't need to do any research other than what is put right in front of you by Tournament Indicator.
