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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Even though they’ve now been popular for quite some time, not all players grasp the basic adjustments necessary to thrive in the rebuy period. You don’t need to plow through multiple buy ins to build a stack – in fact, a strategy that focuses primarily on a strong defensive approach can yield excellent chip results with a minimal investment. Here are a few ways in which the rebuy period differs greatly from a freezeout tournament – hopefully they’ll give you a couple of ideas of how you can shake up your rebuy game and start entering the post-rebuy period with a serious stack.

Reads on Your Opponents are Critical in Early Stages
In a freezeout, you can generally get away with paying less attention to your opponents in the early stages of a tournament. You’re unlikely to be at the table for any great length of time and the majority of players tend to play a pretty straightforward game in the first few levels. In a rebuy, however, it’s critical that you pay close attention to your opponents, as the range of possible opponent behavior can be much, much wider. Identifying the very loose and very aggressive players can pay massive dividends in the rebuy period, so shake your habit of costing through the first levels on auto-pilot and take copious notes – there’s likely to be plenty of action for you to pull from.

Limping Marginal Hands Works
Limping weak connectors in a freezeout is a recipe for chip drain, but that’s not the case during the rebuy period. Those 97o type hands you’re accustomed to ditching in MP can usually be limped (unless the table is super-aggro preflop and there’s likely to be a massive raise behind). Why? First, the rebuy period allows you to call small raises more correctly – it’s simply not as much of a risk to your stack to take highly speculative flops if you can reload that stack. Second, players are generally much looser post-flop during the rebuy period, so your chances of taking down a monster pot if you flop strong increase dramatically.

Limping Strong Hands Works
Limping strong hands in a freezeout is usually a recipe for disaster. Even if you get a raise behind, the stacks are usually so deep that you can’t really extract a lot of value without making your hand pretty obvious. In rebuys, however, players are far more likely to make massive shoves on limps with a wide range. Also, even if you don’t get a raise behind, your overpair has a lot more value post-flop as opponents will commit their stacks on much weaker hands during the rebuy period than they would in a freezeout.

Running Big Bluffs is Generally Useless
The math of bluffing generally requires that you be able to get your opponent to fold a pretty decent hand every now and again for the bluff to be profitable. In a rebuy, very few players are folding pretty decent hands regardless of the pressure you put on them. There are exceptions; if both of you have unusually deep stacks or a board is just horrible for their likely range, a big bluff can still work, but the overwhelming majority of the time a bluff is going to backfire. Save your chips for more profitable endeavors.

Shoving for Value Post-Flop Works
This one’s not rocket science, but tons of players overlook it. In the world of the rebuy period, most players simply aren’t folding reasonable hands like top pair, medium-strength draws and so on. In a world like that, there’s no need for you to massage the pot. Jamming and check-jamming your medium-strength hands and your strong hands will, time after time, get you paid off. Rebuys are not subtle tournaments – you can massively overbet your hands successfully if your opponent already has some chips in or is likely to have hit any piece of the board along with you.

Speculative Calls Pre and Post Flop Can Be Effective and Profitable
The rebuy period plays a lot more like a cash game than a tournament in some ways, and as a result you can afford to play a far wider range against raises and bets than you would in a freezeout. Not only can you replenish your stack, negating some of the risk that usually accompanies such looseness in tournament play, but, again, you’re far more likely to get paid when you do hit due to a similar looseness on the part of your opponents.

Rebuy periods are an interesting, unique part of a tournament, and attentive players who heed the differences can gain a serious chip edge over their opponents. Hopefully the above has given you a starting point for rethinking your own approach and watching your stacks grow while your rebuy costs decrease.

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