You want to enter a limit tournament so you have to have in mind the gap concept. This is the most obvious change you will have o consider when revising your strategy for a tournament like this. You will pay mare attentions to actually winning every pot you get into and the pot odds will be somewhat disregarded here. This doesn’t mean you will do obvious bad moves and get yourself into things you cannot handle. The blind are large when you get yourself further into the tournament, and this is the reason for which you will try and get as little competitors as you can stealing as many blinds as you can to help you rise within the tournaments statistics.
The thing to do is to go through with the hands you see capable of winning the pot. Here hands change values. For example the straight and the flush draws lose their value and high pocket pairs are not so good. On the other hand hands like AK or AQ have a much bigger value because they beat all similar hands like AT, KQ etc. But as you approach the finish you should not get involved with heavy conflicts like when having an A J and you are up against A K. With A J you might get the pot if the flop shows A J, but the A K stands the same chance and it all comes down to luck.
In tournaments you don’t go after getting the whole amount of chips your opponents have, you don’t necessarily want them to pay your hands greatly, you just want to make them afraid. If they know your hand is a dominating one, they will fold and you can this way slowly increase your stack. And you should do the same whenever you feel threatened by a better hand. As the gap concept says, if you raise with a hand like A 9, then a player that has a hand like A 10 will fold, because he must consider the situation in which you could have a better hand like A J.
If you dealt high pocket pairs like KK or AA you should call any raises that were done in front of your. Raising again will help you eliminate players from the round and that is your purpose. Being this aggressive with top hands you show others that you are indeed determined to take all their chips if they were to continue playing against you.
But, you must never forget to judge the hands of others. While playing your hand make time to reflect what other can hold. Understand the gap concept makes you a good player, but keep in mind that there are bad players out there and they will call your bets and raises just because they have a good hand, regardless of what others might have.
