Early Stage Tournament Strategy – Is Tight Right?

Chris Grove : July 15th, 2009

Everybody loves an axiom, especially if it rhymes. Ask a typical tournament player to sum up their strategy for the first few levels of a typical MTT and you’ll likely get a response along the lines of “tight is right”. You’ll see similar advice echoed in almost all major tournament strategy texts. There’s little doubt that the strategy works, insomuch that it generally allows players to safely accumulate chips and survive – but is it optimal?

In this article we’ll cover the tight strategy for the early stages of tournament play from a pro-con perspective. It’s up to you to determine what approach fits best into your game, but hopefully the below will give you a starting point for analyzing whether or not tight really is right for you.

Pros of Playing Tight

Reduced Image Benefit to Playing Loose Early
Tables break quickly in the early stages of tournaments, especially in online tournaments. That means you’re not likely to get one of the key benefits of playing a loose style – a loose image that makes it likely that your opponents will pay off your good hands. Built into a loose strategy is an ‘image cost’ – an investment that you generally need to recoup by getting paid off – and if your opponents are leaving the table before you can collect on that investment, it may just be wasted chips.

Harder to Accurately Range Opponents in Early Stages
Playing loose means you’re heading into a lot of pots – and in the early stages when stacks are deep, you’ll probably end up playing a decent amount of pots out of position. Your opponents are going to be a little tougher to range accurately for a few reasons. One, because stacks are still probably very deep relative to the blinds, players will make odder preflop (and even post-flop) calls and raises, inflating their possible hand range. Two, during the early stages of a tournament you simply don’t have much info on your opponents and are likely to be against a fairly random assortment of players, so it’s hard to employ generic hand ranges. Playing loosely against a table that’s likely to play with you and hard to accurately range is a recipe for chip spew.

Risk Often Outweighs Reward in Early Stages
The math of chip value in tournaments dictates that the chips you lose are generally more valuable than the chip you gain. Put simply, you’re wrong to take a coinflip at even money for your stack in the early stages because the value of a double up is far outweighed by the cost of busting out of the tournament. Obviously, playing loose doesn’t guarantee that you’ll be shipping your stack into the middle in a marginal situation, but playing tight basically guarantees that you won’t.

Cons of Playing Tight

You Often Don’t Build a Stack for Calling All Ins in Mid Stages
One of the safest and most reliable ways to build a large stack in tournament poker is to have extra chips at blind levels where a large percentage of the field is likely to be short stacked and therefore shoving wide. These spots vary according to tournament structure, but there’s usually a point where the starting stack hits a size threshold 10BBs or less where you’ll see a lot of players who had been nitting it up start to shove wide, especially in late position. Playing loose early can help you accumulate a cushion of chips that allows you to call off these shoves with a fairly wide range without really threatening your standing in the tournament. Being able to take gambles against short stacks is critical, and if you can pick up your chips this way, you can generally avoid marginal spots later on in the tournament. Tight players are often coasting on a smallish or medium stack at this point in the tournament, and have to be more conservative against short stack shoves as a result – passing up some excellent +EV spots that allow a player to build a sizable stack with minimal risk.

You Miss Confrontations With Weak Players
Logic dictates that the early stages of a tournament is the point at which the field has the largest percentage of weak players. Logic also dictates that weak players will part with their chips way more easily than strong players. Logic finally dictates that in order to win chips from a player, you have to be involved in a hand with that player. If you’re nitting it up in the early stages, you’re far less likely to get into confrontations with weak players, meaning you’re missing some of your best chances at chip accumulation with marginal hands. The longer you wait, the less chance you’ll have to pick off their chips – and, to make matters worse, you’ll be facing off against an increasingly stronger field armed with the chips of weak opponents that you should have busted.

Contrarian Strategies are Usually Optimal Strategies
In poker, your general goal is to figure out what your opponents expect you to do and then do the opposite. That’s not a lock, but as far as generalized approaches go, it’s pretty close. So, if everyone’s playing tight in the early stages of MTTs, it stands to reason that you should do … not that. Playing loose in early stages will certainly violate the expectations of your opponents – at least some of them – and should, in theory, give you an edge as a result. Obviously it’s not enough to simply do the opposite of prevailing strategy – you still have to be a competent poker player in other regards – but recognizing a spot where you can apply a contrarian approach is generally an opportunity in poker.

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