The Poker Academy.com - How to Accumulate Chips

In my last article, I discussed the idea of accumulating versus surviving in a poker tournament. I feel strongly that accumulating chips in the early parts of poker tournaments gives you a pretty big leg up on the field. I am sure there are a high percentage of people reading this thinking, that sounds great, but how do I do that? You are probably also thinking about all the tournaments where you have been “card dead” for a long period of time.

I think most players love the days when they win a big confrontation or two early in a poker tournament and have the big stack at the table. A lot of people probably think that is what I mean by accumulating chips. Some people even aggressively seek out confrontations with drawing-type hands hoping to get lucky and win some chips early. In reality, that is almost the opposite of what I mean when I talk about accumulating. If you are making negative-value plays while trying to increase your stack, you are hurting your cash rate, your return on investment, and usually your win and final table rates as well.

The idea of accumulating chips is simple—steadily and consistently adding chips to your stack. Imagine scenarios where you bet five percent of your current stack at even money, but are winning sixty to sixty-five percent of the time. There are a lot of situations in poker where the opportunity to make this kind of bet exists. You just have to find them and take advantage of them.

When I first started writing this column, I talked about a bunch of simple situations where your opponents are supposed to fold a high percentage of their range. Meaning, if you consistently bet in these situations, you will show a steady profit.

One article was on increasing your starting range from the button when it folds to you. In a pot with blinds and antes, if you can raise on the button as the first entrant into the pot, you will win this pot preflop at a very high rate. Imagine raising to 2.5 big blinds with 2.5 big blinds in the middle. Imagine the blinds both folding 80 percent of the time. You will be winning the pot preflop 64 percent of the time. At even money, that is a tidy little profit. You also will have a hand sometimes and win the pot after the flop when the blinds don’t fold.

Another article I wrote was on the continuation bet. When you have been the preflop aggressor and are facing a single opponent, you have the opportunity to make a profitable bet whether you hit the board or not. If you bet half the pot, you are getting two to one if your opponent folds. Winning just more than 33 percent of the time makes this a profitable bet. The reality is this bet wins far more often than that.

There are a significant amount of these situations in poker. You can look up my past articles on www.cardplayer.com by searching for Rep Porter and looking through the results. We also have a free tournament kit that you can get by going to www.ThePokerAcademy.com. The kit includes eight videos on various situations where you can use your chips, not your cards, to win pots.

The idea behind accumulating is to make positive expectancy bets. First, you identify situations where a normal poker player should be folding a decent percentage of the hands they are playing, then you take advantage of it by betting.

Sometimes you can find new spots to make these bets simply by trying to remember the situations where you felt compelled to fold. Start looking at those situations. Think about which of the hands you reasonably get into the situation with that you would fold. Which hands would you continue with? If you find a spot where a reasonable player should fold half or more of their hands, then that is a great spot to bet when you are on the other side of the situation.

From your opponent’s point of view, sometimes you may be bluffing, sometimes you may have the hand you are representing, but they will have that same feeling you had when you were facing the same bet. They will want to fold a lot. Winning this type of pot on a regular basis is what accumulating is all about.

If you start to do this, you will also notice that your opponents call you in some of these situations. Don’t be discouraged by that. If you bet half the pot, they can call half the time and you are still showing a tidy profit.

The last big benefit you get from this aggressive style of play is you will have an easier time getting value for your good hands. Once your opponents realize that you are betting more often, they will call you more often. This means you will get more value for your good hands as well.

All in all, using your chips as weapons is the best approach to take when you are trying to accumulate chips in a poker tournament. ♠

Rep Porter is a two-time WSOP bracelet winner and is the lead instructor at ThePokerAcademy.com, whose mission is to help poker players achieve better results through better decisions and that is done by teaching poker in a way that makes learning easy and enjoyable with high quality courses taught by professional players.

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