You enter an online multi-table tournament. You start with a field of 500 and 1500 tournament chips. You’re an hour and a half or so through the battle and 300 are left in the field. You’re in the top 20 left in the field with 14k and the blinds are 100/200. There’s another stack at the table with 10k. There are three players in the 3k-7k range. Three in the 1500-3k range, and the other two are sub 1500.

Some would classify this as the mid-stage of the tourney, I say it’s the latter portion of the early stage, my old man says Sandy Koufax and Bob Gibson, I say Randy Johnson and Greg Maddux. Whatever. The point is that you’re nowhere near the end and the field is still large and though a lot of fat still needs to be cut, people are starting to play a bit more sensibly. What you do now can break you, but nothing big will make you.

The important question to answer is: Is this time to conserve or be aggressive? The answer is that you can do both. A generic answer could be to conserve with your 10k brother, be more situational with the mids, and attack the smalls- especially the sub 1500's.

This is a good way to think, but everyone has questions on how to bet what hands against whom. Everyone has a different answer for you, but no one will argue against the fact that aggression wins tournaments. At this stage you can be aggressive and conserve your chips at the same time.

Let’s determine what you want right now. You want to build your stack. That’s it. Everything else- knocking people out, establishing an “image,” trying not to lose, and the progress of the other tables can go to the back of your head. You have the power of chips. That power is that everyone knows that they can go broke anytime they play a hand with you. Use it without jeopardizing large amounts of your stack.

The way to do this is to play more straight forward in your approach, but to play more often, in small pots. You want to be the aggressor when you choose to play (raise or fold preflop when it’s only 1BB to play), every time you play. Instead of a pot raise or a 4BB raise, keep your raises in the 2.5-3BB range. You can also call in family pots with connectors in position, but your Ace-Jacks and worse are dangerous in family pots. Family pots will be big pots. Minimize your investment in these pots without premium hands (Aces through Queens) until you have greatly reduced your “chance” by seeing the flop.

Your flop bets can be 60% or 75% of the pot. These bets are just as effective as pot bets. The message is the same and either way people don’t want to part with chips and the fact that you’re not in danger of going broke and being the aggressor gives you the control to best test the waters and know the strength of questionable hands.

Example: You hold Ace-Jack in middle position. Not a raising hand and questionable calling hand. Everyone folds to you and you raise it to T500. If someone has a bigger Ace, Queens, or better, they’ll reraise. If someone has Jacks, they might reraise, they might not, but if all three Jacks are in two people’s hands, hitting a Jack is very unlikely.

Quite simple in that you don’t have to change your thought process, you’ll gain more information how the other’s perceive you by playing more hands, and the worst case scenario is that you get reraised and keep yourself out of trouble. Best case, you take 300 chips. Better case, you get called by one person and lead on ragged flop and take a T1300 pot.

Leading on the flop is important. Of course, this is where the importance of position is heightened. You don’t want to be trapped, so whether you lead or not will be more determined by your opponent, their stack, and your hand. You’re looking to steal pots in quantity to set your traps more effectively, not scare someone with a strong hand to call you down all the way because you were aggressive in an early position.

Aggression is an act that invokes fear. Some react to fear with over-aggression and others with hiding. Very few are in-between. Aggression is effective when it’s shown and it can be shown with little risk to your stack while still building your stack. Don’t get poker reatrded and set a timer to when to start this strategy. If people are still displaying retard aggression, the pots will be big, so play it straight. The emotion that you’re looking to arouse invokes bad play, so turn it on and off with your best instincts. But it does invoke bad play.