STT Basic Strategy

Single Table Tournaments are a great way to get started in online poker and you will learn some really valuable lessons for if you branch out into multi table tournaments. An STT begins with between 4 and 10 players at a table and usually anyone who finishes in the top third will get a cash prize. So in a 9 person STT, the final three players will win money. Because 1 in 3 players usually make it into the money, one of the fundamental strategies to employ is ‘survival’. Going all guns blazing for the win is not necessarily the right approach to take and you need to balance ‘playing for the win’ and ‘playing to make the money’.

Perhaps more than any other discipline of poker, playing tight and aggressive is key in STTs, that is playing only the best starting hands and playing them aggressively when you do. There is a fundamental theory in STTs that the chips you lose have more value than the chips you win. That is because when you win 100% of the chips in play you do not win 100% of the prize money. If ten players pay $10 in a single table tournament, the winner doesn’t get $100 they get something like $45, but if you bust out before the money you still lose your whole $10. This is why you need to stick to premium hands early in STTs, because busting out on a weak hand or crazy bluff usually wasn’t worth the risk of doing so in the first place.

The difference between finishing inside the money and outside of it is massive in STTs, which is why how you play the ‘bubble’ is also incredibly important. The ‘bubble’ is the time just before the last person outside of the money will be eliminated, so in a 9 person STT with 3 places paying, the bubble will be when there are 4 people remaining. Good players can exploit the bubble to accumulate chips because everybody will tighten up as they do not want to be the final person to bust outside the money.

Look at your stack and determine what current finishing position you are in and your bubble strategy should be based a lot on that. Let’s say it’s a 4 handed bubble, if you are the chip leader then you are currently in 1st place. Now is the time to be aggressive and bully the other players, because they will not want to bust out and you have the potential to eliminate them before the money. If you are currently in 4th place and the least likely to make it into the money you need to accumulate more chips, so also be more aggressive, particularly against the medium stacks because they will not want to tangle with you and be a short stack themselves. Finally if you are a medium stack you unfortunately are in a tough spot and need to play very solid poker, you need a very strong hand to justify going out before the money, so be prepared to make some very big folds of small-medium pairs and decent ace type hands.

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