Avoiding The Game Of Chicken
The continual evolution of no limit texas holdem sees so many hyper aggressive poker players continually turn it up on both the live and the online poker tournaments. Their strategy is rather simple, hit it up as chip leader or go bust trying. No point going around small balling everybody when one can intimidate the small ballers so that they do not bother trying to small ball away the aggressive player¡¯s chips.
In big live tournaments, it is not very important to try and recognise who the internet pros are and try to avoid playing them in big pots early on in tournaments. The internet pros are use to busting early and then moving on to another tournament so, busting to them is just all in a day¡¯s work. Where as a live player does not work on the exact same system. Maybe some travel has been involved, hotel rooms booked so it is actually best to avoid risking the entire stack so early on in the tournament by avoiding big pots with the internet pros.
In order to keep the pots small, it is perfectly respectable to just call some of the preflop raises. A re-raise on a pre flop raise might mean another re-raise or an all in bet from the other aggressive players at the table. Suddenly you are caught in a sticky situation with your queens or ace king. Do you take the gamble and push all in as well? or suddenly fold because you would prefer to be the initial all in player later on in the tournament, closer to the bubble?
Depending on the structure of the tournament, the question can be answered in different ways, but at least just for the first level of a tournament, you can save your chips to push harder on the second or third level.
