Your choices of hands becomes very limited when you have a medium stack and when there is action in front of you, it is time to back off and leave the risk to the other poker players at the table on poker sites. Hands that you may think about raising with at other times become unplayable here. It is all about position and how much is in your stack at this point.
One of everyone’s favorite hands in poker is 78 suited. There are endless possibilities that can happen with this and when it is a cash game or you have a big stack, you want to be in the middle of the action at all times with this kind of a hand. One gaps and baby pairs are gold mines if you can dig around enough and finally catch one. When your stack is limited, all they do is put you out of a tournament.
When someone is raising in early position, most times it will denote strength. You have to respect that move in a tournament with limited chips and get out of the way. Unless you hit the absolute nuts, you have little to play and are putting yourself into a position to go all in with a very weak hand. This is not a problem in cash play, but there is no re buy in a MTT and all your prospecting gets you is a trip to the rail.
There is a time and a place to make a stand, but this is not it. Letting go of these hands, even for a small raise takes a lot of discipline, but it is something that you must learn to be able to do or getting deep into tournaments will be more luck than skill for you. Learning this discipline will pay off as even if you don’t get to cash, you will be hanging around a lot longer and giving yourself a chance at making a run.
Everyone preaches that aggression is the key to success at any poker table, but that is truer in cash games than it is in tournaments. It is one of the reasons that a lot of cash game experts have a lot of problems making that initial transition over to the tournament structure. If they do not have a big stack, they simply do not know how to play because they have always had the option of being able to reload before.
Medium stack play is far and away the most difficult of any tournament play. You have to be careful as to what hands you play and you have to pay particular attention to every move that is being made on the table. This takes a lot of patience and more skill at reading situations. Whatever you do, don’t get frustrated at the lack of hands that you play when you are in this position, just concentrate on making them count.
