Even though the rules in high stakes and small stakes poker tournaments are exactly the same there are some key differences in the correct strategy to these tournaments. The main cause of this is naturally the fact in the bigger tournaments you are on average playing against better and more experienced poker players, and on the low stakes tournaments you are playing against less experienced players.. who admittedly also are often less skilled. But it is certainly worth mentioning that also in the smaller tournaments you might meet some extremely skilled players, and naturally against these the strategy described in this article might be quite wrong, for that reason it always important that you asses the skill level the exact opponent(s) you are against in the hand and after that decided what is the best way to play your hand.

The following tips are mainly for online poker tournaments with 100 to 3,000 players which have an about standard prize pool (about 10% of the finishers win money and there is a sharp increase in the prizes in the final table)

Strategy tips for low stakes poker tournaments:

1: Start slow. On basic level poker tournaments are all about surviving until you find the good spots to get your money in. At the beginning of the tournament when the blinds are still very small compared to your stack there is very little reason to take any risks. Also as you might know it is actually more important to protect your stack then it is to increase it. Thus at beginning of the tournament stick to playing premium hands, and only play even the good kind drawing hands (lot of nut potential without the risk of hitting a hand that is easily 2^nd best and loses a big pot) when you can enter the pots cheaply and have reason to expect that you might stand to make lot of money if you hit your hand (you ideally want there to be lose cannon in the pot who will blow his stack to you when you hit your hand).

2: Remember that KJ offsuited is not a premium hand in no limit texas holdem. This might seem as way to general advice to give, but there is actually wider meaning behind it. All that type of hands that easily hit top pair, two pairs or trips (but almost never anything better) but can easily be the 2^nd best made hands are disastrous. KJ, QT, J9 and so on are great examples of this type of hands. Often when you mange to hit your trips with that type of hand someone has the trips with better kicker. Naturally when the situation is reversed it is easy to understand why playing hands such as AK, AQ and is a great idea.

3: Look for people who are scared to play back at you. When the tournament gets deeper and you approach the money (or there is about to be an increase in the prize money) some people start playing way too tight. When you notice that they are playing tight don’t be afraid of stealing pots from them. But don’t take unnecessary risks when you are trying to steal pots from these people. For an example when you are trying to steal their blinds before the flop it is often enough to raise only 2.75 times the big blind (e.g if blinds were 500 and 1,000 you would open raise to 2,750 chips) to take the pot down. Don’t make the mistake of doing unnecessary all ins and big raises, because after all even those scare players will call you down when they happen to have that rare true monster hand.