Live Freeroll Tournament Strategy

I played a freeroll tournament plus infinite £5 re-buy/addon at Gcasino on Friday night and came 6^th out of 100 players.  In fact, I actually should have won the tournament however whilst I was 2^nd chip leader I lost all in 77 vs AQ pre-flop to the chip leader who just had me covered.

If I’d won that hand then I’d have had around 80% of the chips on the table and easily be able to stack off the others.  On the other hand, I could have folded my pockets sevens and sat out comfortably waiting for a couple more players to bust out.

How to Play Live Freeroll Tournaments

The trick to playing freeroll tournaments live is to make sensible moves and not feels compelled to play too aggressive out of position.  In a feeroll tournament you’re naturally going to get a lot of loose, piss-poor players moving all in too early or out of position.  There’s going to be players playing K5 off suit from MP, big blinds calling 3bets with A8, and lots of fish hunting for the river.

Because there’s so many poor players at these games my advice is easy: keep it simple.

First of all, I actually find it quite easy being short stacked in tournaments which are something a lot of players find uncomfortable.  The majority of cash game players are too used to being sat 100 BB deep with infinite re-buys at their disposal.  This allows you to chase draws, set mine and play out of position or from behind much more easily.

In tournaments however, you can’t do this.  This is why I find tournaments so much easier!  Everything you do in a tournament can be played by the book. First of all, you need to fold 90% of your hands out of position.  This makes life incredibly easy because you only need to “think” or concentrate once you finally get a good hand.  The only hands that I consider playing out of position are AQ+ and JJ+.  Of course, I may also “limp” or shove all-in with low pocket pairs if I’m in position and most of the players have already check/folded.

Most of the time in a tournament you’re only going to be around 10-25BBs deep.  This doesn’t mean that you’re a bad player, it’s a simple fact that the blinds increase faster than the rate at which you can accumulate chips.

Your low chip stack (M ratio = 10) means that you can’t afford to slow play hands or make raises pre-flop.  Once you get a good enough hand you simply gotta jam it all in. And here’s a secret not many people will tell you about tournaments.  In order to win you HAVE to get lucky.  No one has ever won a tournament without getting lucky going all in and sucking out (e.g. AQ vs KK or K7 suited vs A10).  So don’t worry about moving all in or getting called when you’re the underdog – it’s all part of the game and you need to take these kinds of risks in order to build up a stack and get to the later stages.

Personally, I think one of my biggest flaws in my strategy is that I analyse too many scenarios like they’re a cash game using the +EV formula.  Instead, you need to use the tournament dollars formula or ICM (independent chip model).  This allows you to make calculated all-in decisions based on tournament equity as opposed to simply “how many chips your risk vs winnings”.  Once you get to the final stages of a tournament the ICM principle becomes extremely important.  It provides a system for explaining why you shouldn’t be confronting or calling the big stack’s all in even as a marginal favourite if there’s short stack players at the table who are about to bust out.  You can simply sit out the hand and fold and wait for your payoff to increase.