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Five Card Draw Tournament Strategy
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Strategy For Five Card Draw Poker Tournaments
Five card draw may be one of your favorite poker games; it is certainly popular enough around the world. Playing five card draw in a tournament situation is a bit more complex than sitting around the poker table on Saturday night with your best poker buddies or at an online poker room. Let’s look over some of the most winning tips and strategies that the big boys use when they are playing for loads of cash in five card draw tournaments, and how you can put their advice to use in your own game so that you can maximize your bankroll and win big. If you play single tables tournaments please see our article on 5 card draw sitngo strategy. You can also improve your game by reading our limit specific 5 card draw strategy articles:
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Watching Your Opponents
Each and every hand of five card draw that you play, you must focus on the number of cards that your opponents discard and draw during the game’s drawing rounds. This is useful information that can allow you to discern the strength or weakness of your opponents’ hands and just how your hand stacks up against theirs. By judging the strength (or lack of strength) of your opponents’ hands, you can make better decision about your game play from each position around the table.
Betting Tendencies
Although it is hard to judge your opponents based on betting tendency when you are playing with unfamiliar players, it is possible. You can pick up on how they tend to bet when they have a strong hand, and how they react to betting when they have a weak hand. After playing a few rounds, you will come to get a pretty good notion of whether they are aggressive with sure-win hands or if they are conservative no matter how good their hands are. This allows you to know the people that are playing around the table better and the better you know them, the easier it is to read into their betting actions as compared to the hand they are holding.
Patience Pays Off
Five card draw is a relatively fast game to play; however, if you lack patience or can’t bring yourself to be patient, then you will not be a consistent winner in five card draw. You must have the ability or develop the ability to wait through bad hands and save your bankroll for when it really counts. One bad habit that those five card draw tournament players who lack patience tend to fall into is drawing to inside flushes or straights, even though their common sense tells them that they probably won’t hit or improve their hands in doing so. Five card draw takes patience, so practice patience in waiting for better hands to come your way, then go in for the “kill”. You also need the patience in five card draw to be able to hide the strength of your own hand when you have a pot-taker that is nearly unbeatable. If your opponents don’t have a clue how much power you are holding, this will work to your advantage because when you do get to the showdown, you’ll have a bigger pot to call you own.
Avoid the Chase
As mentioned before, many five card draw tournament players will chase after cards that the odds say are against them drawing. Only play hands that have the following characteristics: you’ve been dealt a pair, a flush with a high kicker card, or an open-ended straight. Avoid chasing cards that you know are historically hard to draw to and you’ll go a long way towards increasing your bankroll and your payday.
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