Exclusive Netbettor Texas Hold'em Article:

Tournament Concepts Part I
Playing the Big Stack Early

So—you've just sat down in a 500 person multi table Texas hold em tournament at your favorite online poker room, when you look up at the screen and see you have pocket queens. All fold to you, you make a standard raise (say, three times the big blind), the button calls and both blinds call. The flop comes Q85, no suits, and suddenly all hell breaks loose. The small blind goes all in, the big blind follows, and you gleefully tag along. When the smoke clears your set of queens holds up against the small blind's 8 5 and the big blind's slowplayed pocket kings. You're three hands into the tournament, and you've already tripled up.

Which brings us to the next question: What's a Texas hold em player to do now?

Most Texas hold em players know that you should play the role of the schoolyard bully with a big stack. Push your opponents around, steal more than your share of pots, and so forth. But what they don't recognize is precisely what constitutes a big stack. Most players think of stack size in a Texas hold em tournament as something that works in relation to the blinds- or even to the other stacks at the table. This is correct, but it doesn't take enough into account, as you should also be concerned with size of your stack relative to the total number of chips in play. True, the size of the blinds also plays a major role in any Texas hold em tournament. But the number of total chips in play is a major consideration that's frequently overlooked. Let's take a look and see why.

Let me illustrate. Say you're in a 5,000 player Texas hold em tournament, and everyone starts with ten thousand chips. You double up early, and now you're at T20000 while everyone else at your table is at T8000-T12000. Should you alter your play? Absolutely not. You only have 1/5000 of the chips currently in play, which isn't nearly enough to get excited about. If, however, you make it into the final ten, and you're sitting on a stack of 2.5 million while everyone else is around half a million to one million, you're now in a position to start pushing some hands.

In the example illustrated above the fact that you've tripled up doesn't appreciably increase your chances of winning—or even placing- in the Texas hold em tournament in question. It's nice to triple up early, to be sure, but it doesn't mean as much as tripling up in the later stages. Why? Because you still only have a fraction of the chips that are currently in play. Should you be lucky enough to make it to the final table and manage to triple up a decent sized stack, you'll be in a position to start altering your play. But in the early stages of a Texas hold em tournament you should stick to a tight and conservative playing strategy.

Still confused? Next week we'll look at another key Texas hold em tournament concept, which is how chips actually change in value as the tournament progresses. This concept—which may be the one concept that's most responsible for guiding the play of experienced Texas hold em tournament pros—is so important that a player who fully understands it will usually have a mammoth advantage over the average player. It's a complicated dynamic, so we'll spend considerable time next week dissecting it. Until then, remember: a big stack early on does not play the same as a big stack in a Texas hold em tournaments later stages.

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