Tournaments... my love, my hate.

Over the last few years I've played a good amount of online poker. Maybe my biggest struggle has been with tournaments. They are soooo tempting, because you can win so much, for so little. However, too many times you play for 5 hours, only to take a bad beat right before the final table and have your dreams crushed. In the last 6 months, I have had to face the reality, that I am not a winning tournament player... and that it would be best for me to stick with multi-tabling cash games. I have done that pretty sucessfully the last few months, mostly just using my FullTiltPoints to satelite into tournaments, and those are mostly all I play. I have a friend who plays on Poker Stars and almost only player tournaments with varying success, but I would say he's much better than me, and definitely turns over a profit. He told me about a book he read by Gus Hansen, "All Hands Revealed". This book documented almost every hand Gus' played, with his own commentary on why he plays in such a ridiculous way. He is well known around the world as a madman at the poker table. My friend read it and told me the advice he got from it for tournaments was incredible.

Considering I love playing tournaments, and wanting to get much better at them, I decided to should do what I did when I first learned how to play poker. Pick up some books and learn everything I can about good tournament strategy. I ordered Gus Hansen's book, as well as both of the "Harrington on Hold'em" books on tournaments. I got them in the mail this last week, and quickly zoomed through Gus' book, amazed at how he runs over tables, and crushes the field with inferior holdings. I was quickly convinced that this was the way to play tournament poker, because everyone sits around and waits fro hands, and tries to stay alive. Someone has to exploit them, why not me? Honestly, I had been figuring this out before reading Gus' book, but didn't know how best to do it. The other big thing I learned from the book was to defend your blinds against weak raises, even if you have a weak hand. Also, to very often lead out into the preflop raiser and put them in tough decisions, instead of always "checking to the raiser" which lets them exploit their positional advantage. These things were huge to learn, and I felt they would help me improve my game tremendously.

I am about 1/3 the way through Harrington's first book, but already feel like Gus has helped me take great leaps.

-Boooom