Improving Your MTT Skills with UPoker: Train for USOP Finals

08/17/2021

Article sponsored by UPoker

U Series of Poker 2021 World of Champions 2 has already kicked off. The stakes are getting even higher as the players move deeper into the competition. The USOP Trophy-Lineup, sponsored by UPoker, consist of very unique and priceless works of exquisite craftsmanship. You may catch a glimpse of the championship trophy line-up at the link here.

However, before you can get your hands on those immaculate trophies, read on to improve your MTT skills.

1. Playing the right starting hands

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Any player who has sought out very rudimentary poker know-how, will understand the concept of the playable hand chart. The chart will tell you what are the best hands to play.

If the action is folded to you and you have a hand you want to play, you should generally come out raising. If you don’t think your hand is good enough to raise with, then just fold.

This prevents your opponents from being able to put you on a weak hand (which you would signal by limping) and also forces the other players to put more money into the pot pre-flop when you are holding a good hand.

Of course this becomes second-nature to a poker player once you have played in enough tables. The experience will render the playable hand-chart useless. You can fast-forward your way to gaining all that experience with UPoker’s Multi-table Modes seen on the left.

2. Adjust strategy based on stack size

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The general rule of poker strategy is as follows:

Play tight early.

During the early levels of tournaments, you’ll usually have the most chips in comparison to the blinds. Many tournaments will start you off with 200 or 300 big blinds. In these stages, you should actually be quiteconservativeand wait for good opportunities.

Always know the average stack size

As the tournament progresses, the average stack size will change. People willbust outso the total average will increase. Ideally, you want to always be around the average size.

Don’t waste chips

If you do have a decent stack, you should use your chips wisely. Make your moves in good spots where you can expect to win pots without much effort and, preferably, without ashowdown.

Pressure players in the bubble (Players will tighten up after the bubble)

As the bubble approaches in the tournament, you’ll see many players tighten up for fear of busting just before making money. At this stage, you can apply a lot of pressure unless you’re one of the shortest stacks at the table.

Learn to manage a minuscule stack

It happens every now and then that you are left with just a few big blinds in your stack. If and when this happens, you’ll no longer have any fold equity, so basically you want to get the chips in the middle as soon as possible, especially if there are antes involved eating up your stack on every hand. Anything that looks remotely reasonable, any ace, any paint, and pretty much all suited connectors should be more than enough.

UPoker’s SnG Game Mode is a good way to have fast paced MTTs to give you a good practice.

3. Defend your big-blinds in a wider range

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The tightness of the average player’s blind defence range varies widely. Most of us would never dream of defending so tightly just because we are out of position. It’s a huge disadvantage being out of position. Only about 10% of hands are defensible against the BTN (button). But this doesn’t automatically mean that we want to simply start folding everything.

One of the ways we can defend our wider pre-flop range is byaggressively check-raising flops where we have potential. It’s considered correct to check-raise bluff twice as many flops as we check-raise for value. In other words, most of the time when we check-raise the flop, we should be bluffing.

Get some practice playing full-length MTT tournaments and learn to defend against blinds huge or minuscule at the UPoker MTT Lobby games. You might just win a UPoker VIP card in-time for U Series Of Poker – World of Champions II.