Forget all of the garbage you’ve heard from people in the past who claim they enter poker tournaments to enjoy themselves and have fun. Because unless the tournament is for charity or played with fake money, people will be doing anything to cash out in the end. But herein lies the problem with many tournament players – they spend too much time thinking about the end!

Most of these players who sit at the felt daydreaming about taking the top prize at the end are the first ones to hit the rail in the early stages of a tournament. That’s why it is so important for players to focus on proper play at the beginning so they actually have a chance to cash towards the end. 

If I were going to be building a house deck for the first time, I would have to have some sort of plan on how to do it whether that meant buying an instructional book or watching how someone else built it. If I’d never cashed in a poker tourney, I would need to have some sort of action plan for this too.

Surprisingly enough, there are plenty of players who’ve never cashed in a big tournament before and they jump right in with no sense of what they are trying to accomplish. In short, they have no goal for what they expect their end result to be. And what should the end result for a successful player be?

The answer is cashing out and nothing more. Sure it would be nice to win but focusing on trying to double up early just to be a chip leader is a recipe for disaster. Instead a player needs to focus their attention on playing solid in the early going to make it past the beginning stages.

At the start of any tournament there are going to be plenty of Phil Hellmuth and Phil Ivey fanboys trying to play super-aggressive with big bets and all-in calls because they saw their idols do it on TV. It’s best not to go head-on with these players in the early going because they can sometimes catch lucky breaks on the turn and river to deliver bad beats to decent players.

Now this doesn’t mean one should fold up A-K and pocket jacks just to make it off the first couple of tables because this type of play will get one short-stacked real quick. However, one should play fairly tight in the early going and let the bad players knock each other out.

Since setting a goal and avoiding head-on collisions with out of control players has been discussed, it’s time to get into playing tight a little bit more. Now in an early tournament situation, playing only 1 out of every 9 or 10 hands is not unreasonable provided the stacks are deep and the tables aren’t shorthanded (you don’t want the blinds eating you away).

Bad players will often make the mistake of playing too many hands with cards like pocket 5’s in middle position. Like I said before, sometimes they will catch lucky breaks but you don’t want to be catching those along with them. It’s best to muck cards like these in an early or middle position until things open up a little bit.

As previously stated, it is definitely a virtue to be a tight player looking to gradually build a stack in the early stages rather than a risk-it-all maniac trying to win the tourney on the first day. With that being said though, one still will need to make moves in order to avoid the short stack.

That means making the correct plays when they arise and trying to win some hands when opportunity presents itself. However, there are certainly times when it makes more sense to avoid clashing with uncertainty that could spell out an early tournament exit.

For example, say a person’s stack is on par with everyone else at the table in a No Limit Hold’em event and they’re holding K-Q in middle position. Now this is obviously a great hand to try and test the waters with so the person calls only to be raised with an all-in bet by a player behind them. It’s no fun to fold up a K-Q hand but does one really want to let the board decide their tournament fate this early on?