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Poker should be considered one big, long session. Each time you sit at the table you should attempt to play your best. As long as you are playing well and your opponents are making mistakes, you should keep playing.

Whether you are up or down for the night should not be a consideration if you are thinking about getting up from the table, unless it is affecting your play.

Luck plays a large factor in your results in any given night. Poker is about the long run and your job is to make good decisions. Leaving a table simply because you are up for the night may cause you to miss out on even bigger wins later on.

Many players set a limit for their potential losses when they are at the table (ie. if they lose a certain amount of money they will stop playing). This is a very good strategy if you are the type of player who is more likely to make mistakes if you are down.

Some players experience this type of tilt, especially if they are losing as a result of their opponents’ luck. However, if you are able to play solid poker even when you have been losing, then it might be in your best interest to stay at the table.

If you are losing because your opponents have been getting lucky, then you are at a good table. Your opponents are making mistakes, which is what you want from your opponents. Chances are that your opponent’s good luck will not continue if they are playing poorly. By staying at the table, you may find that you will be able to recoup your losses and show a profit.

Regardless of whether you are winning or losing, you want to play at a table where your opponents are playing badly. So, unless you find that you do not play your best based on being up or down for the night, then you might as well keep playing……after all it is just one big, long session.

Poker players often disagree about the proper strategy to employ in no limit multi-table tournaments. Many poker theorists argue that survival should be the ultimate goal. They believe that unless you are very certain that you will win the hand, folding is the best option.

They argue that you can’t win a tournament in the first hour, therefore playing a very tight game is the ideal strategy. They feel that if you survive until the later stages of a tournament you will have the opportunity to get lucky and make a run at the final table.

Many of the top poker pros deviate from this strategy and believe that taking risks early on in order to build a large stack gives them the best opportunity to win.

Instead of playing an extremely tight game at the beginning stages of a tournament, many pros will try to play a lot of hands provided they can see the flop cheaply. They feel that there are many bad players who will bust out fairly quickly and the top players want those chips.

The top players want to build their stack so that they will be able to push other players around. By building a big stack early, they avoid being worried if they go card dead during a later stage of the tournament since they will have enough chips to pay the increasing blinds.

The downside to this strategy is that by taking some risks early on, these players are much more likely to be knocked out earlier than a tight player. The funny thing is that some players don’t really think of this as a downside. They would much rather get knocked out early and join another tournament or a ring game, than play for hours and hours just to win back their original buy-in. They know that payouts in tournaments are usually very top heavy, and their goal is to make the final table.

Poker players can have success with either strategy. The key is to play a style with which you are comfortable. Playing a “survival” style will decrease your variance and allow you to play longer on average in tournaments.

The survival strategy might be ideal in situations where you had to drive for hours to get to the tournament and there are no other games available if you get knocked out. Online players can quickly join another game, so busting out early is not quite as disheartening.

One of the biggest mistakes that many poker players make is that they lose money playing too many hands from the blind positions. Overall you will lose money from the big blind and small blind, since every rotation you are contributing to the pot regardless of the strength of your hands. Players often call raises with poor starting hands because they feel that they have already put money into the pot. Once you have put money into the pot, you should no longer consider that money your own. That money belongs to the pot.

When you call raises from the small blind, you are the first to act throughout the rest of the hand. This is a huge disadvantage that many players do not realize. They often have to either discard the hand on the flop, or even worse, cost themselves more money by calling bets on each street with the second best hand. Dangerous hands such as hitting top pair with a poor kicker, will just cost you a lot of money in the long run. You don’t want to throw away good money after bad.

There are exceptions however, as there are with any poker guidelines. In very loose games, when there are at least four players seeing the flop, you will often have the pot odds to call raises with a much wider range of hands. In these types of games, you need to demonstrate good post flop skills in order to be profitable. Suited cards will slightly go up in value, since you will have the opportunity to flop a flush draw. Playing connected cards such as 76 can also be very profitable in loose games, but be aware that you are looking to flop two pair, trips, straights or straight draws.

Hands like K4 off-suit and Q7 are trouble hands and by calling raises with these poor holdings, you are putting yourself into a dangerous spot. The only outcome in the long run will be that you will lose more money from the blind positions than you should. Those single bets that you throw away as a result of calling raises from the blinds add up, and often mean the difference between being a winning poker player or a losing poker player.