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Expert no-limit tournament players do a great job of building their stack even when they have gone card dead. They use their stack size and position at the table to prey on timid players and do not necessarily rely on the cards they are dealt.

Expert poker players play their opponents as much as they play their cards. When you steal the blinds, you win enough chips to play one more orbit at the table. When you steal a pot after there has been a pre-flop raise, you win enough chips to play a few orbits, so you do not need to steal pots as frequently.

One of my favourite moves when I am in the big blind is to just call a pre-flop raise from somebody in late position, preferably the button. Most tournament players know the importance of stealing blinds, so if your opponent raises in late position, there is a good chance that they do not have a premium hand.

Statistics show that two thirds of the time they will not have improved their hand on the flop. Most players who have raised pre-flop will still bet after the flop, even if the flop did not help them. By check raising them on the flop, you will often take down the pot. You do not necessarily have to have a strong hand, but you are hoping that they do not either.

When you are successful, you will usually win enough chips to play three or four more orbits. There are obvious dangers to attempting this move, such as your opponent actually having a very strong hand or flopping a draw. You should only attempt this move against tight timid players who have demonstrated that they can fold a hand.

Another move that you can make against a late position raiser is to just come over the top and go all-in pre-flop. Again, you are hoping that they do not have a hand that they are willing to risk their entire stack on.

You are risking your stack based on the situation rather then the strength of your own cards. Unless you have a great read on your opponent, you do not want to attempt this move with junk hands like 72 off-suit. If you attempt to come over the top, try to do it with hands that still give you a shot at winning the pot if you are called.

Hands like small pocket pairs, suited connectors, or A-x always have a good shot at winning the hand when called, however your goal is to get your opponent to fold pre-flop. You want to try this move against players who will raise pre-flop with weak hands trying to win the blinds.

Do not attempt to come over the top of a player who has not played a hand in 20 minutes. The chances are they have a very strong hand and would be willing to call your all-in.

Both of these moves have obvious risks, but if you can learn to identify the spots when these moves will be successful, you will be able to build your stack without having a strong hand.

You do not have to worry about being blinded out because you will win larger pots than if you had just stolen the blinds. You do not want to attempt either move if you are very short stacked because the likelihood of your opponent calling you is much greater. Your goal is to get your opponent to fold.

It takes some trial and error to be able to add either of these moves to your arsenal until you are extremely confident that you will be successful. When you are, you will be able to go much deeper in tournaments, even when you are not getting good cards.

Poker players often talk about the long run when analyzing their play. To help understand “the long run”, try flipping a coin ten times. We know that the odds of the coin landing on heads is fifty percent.

However this does not mean that the coin will alternate between heads and tails on each consecutive flip. You are very likely to see the coin land tails a few times in a row. In those ten flips, the coin might land on heads sixty or seventy percent of the time. In reality, the results of any small sample size are likely to differ from the expected results.

It is only through repeating the process over “the long run” that we begin to achieve the expected results. If you were really bored one weekend and flipped the coin a million times, you would find that heads will land much closer to 50% than in your sample of ten coin flips.

Understanding the concept of odds and how they relate to poker will help you analyze your game and hopefully will help you deal with the emotional ups and downs of the game. As poker players we can calculate the odds of us hitting our draws.

We know that if we hold a flush draw on an unpaired board, the odds of us completing the flush on the river are 4:1. That means that if we call for one big bet after the turn, there needs to be more than four big bets in the pot for our play to be correct.

If we only call the bet if we have the correct pot odds, we know that in the long run it will be a profitable play. Obviously we won’t hit our draw on each and every hand, but we can feel good knowing that we made the right decision.

Continuing with the flush draw example, our success in any given session will often depend on us actually hitting the draw. If a player has eight flush draws in a row and doesn’t complete his draw on any of them, it is very likely he will have a losing session.

During the next session, if the same player completes five out of eight nut flush draws, he will be very likely to have a winning session. During both sessions he played great poker, but his results were dependant on the short term fluctuations of the game. After playing a million hands, this player will have hit his flush draw very close to 20 percent of the time.

Poker can be a frustrating game when we do not hit our draws despite playing correctly, due to great pot odds. Don’t be discouraged when you feel that you are not hitting your draws because if you make the right decisions, you will be a winning player in the long run.

In no-limit ring games and tournaments, a limp re-raise is an effective weapon to use in order to take advantage of aggressive players who have position on you. Instead of raising pre-flop with your premium hands like pocket aces, by limping when you are the first to enter the pot you will encourage aggressive players who act after you to raise the pot.

You can then re-raise with your premium hand, which will result in you either taking down the pot, which is now larger, or playing a very big pot if they decide to call your re-raise. The benefits of this move are that you will get more chips in the pot. The key is that you want to be the first to enter the pot, so this move works especially well when you are under the gun.

The danger of attempting to limp re-raise is that nobody raises the pot behind you. You would then be forced to play a multi-way pot not knowing if one of your opponents has outdrawn you. So if your table happens to be classified as fairly passive, you would be better off to merely raise pre-flop with your premium pocket pair.

You should consider limp re-raising with hands like pocket aces and pocket kings. You can also limp re-raise with pocket queens or AK if your opponents are willing to raise with less than great hands. However, since pocket queens and AK are hands that you are more likely to fold after seeing the flop, then it is usually better to just raise with them pre-flop.

The amount that you re-raise with does depend on the stack sizes in relationship to the blinds. Since you should be willing to get all your chips in the middle with pocket aces or kings, your re-raise should be a significant amount. Usually a re-raise of three times that of your opponent’s raise is sufficient.

If either you or your opponent is relatively short-stacked, you might as well go all in with your re-raise. Just keep in mind that you are trying to build a large pot and if your opponent does fold, you will still have won a nice pot.

Another benefit of limp re-raising with your pocket aces is that if your opponents see that you are capable of making this move, it may allow you to limp in the future with hands like pocket fives without being raised. They will fear that you have a premium hand and allow you to see a flop cheaply. It will offer you more options to play hands from early position.

The flip side of course is when an opponent makes a limp re-raise from under the gun. It is a sign of great strength and unless your opponent plays like a maniac, you should fold all of your hands with the exception of pocket aces.

Nine times out of ten that your opponent attempts an under the gun limp re-raise they have pocket aces, so this might be one of the rare times that folding pocket kings is correct.