Poker tournaments have been popular in poker for a good few years now but there are all different kinds of tournaments. In the UK then small re-buy events have always been very popular. I never liked re-buy events because they never seemed like real poker to me until the re-buy period was over. I have seen some players have almost silly numbers of re-buys. In fact I was actually dealing on a poker table some years ago when one person had no fewer than nineteen re-buys. These events are designed to get higher attendance figures but they do need to be played with a certain strategy.
A lot depends on what your objectives are. If you absolutely want to go for the win then there is a key stage in the event that you must avoid at all costs. This is the stage where you become short stacked. Common tournament tactics dictate that you should never allow your stack to fall below ten big blinds. However this is too low in my opinion and your chances of coming back into contention when you only have ten big blinds are slim. This is where I would advise on taking what I call pre-emptive strikes.
If you have say 4000 in chips and the blinds are 100-200 then you have a comfortable 20 big blinds…..but are you comfortable? If you go through the blinds and lose 300 then you are down to 3700. Blinds increase to 200-400 and you go through the blinds again and are down to 3100 and less than eight big blinds just a short while later. So you have gone from 20 big blinds to less than 8 big blinds in almost no time at all. This is the stage of the event that you must avoid at all costs.
