Fundamentals help pave way to big win

A few years ago, I had my biggest score in online poker, cashing for more than $320,000 in a tournament with a $1,000 buy-in.

Despite the huge field, which normally indicates a large number of amateurs playing in an event, this tournament was incredibly tough because you could reenter it over and over. As a result, there were far more professionals playing in this event than there would be in a freeze-out event, making it one of the toughest online tournaments to ever take place.

While I normally make it a point to play a loose, aggressive style whenever possible, this event taught me an important lesson: It is ideal to use a tight, aggressive strategy when a field is loaded with good players.

When most of the players at your table know what they’re doing, you should not get too far out of line. While you may not have a large win rate by playing a fundamentally sound, nearly unexploitable strategy, you do make it much less likely that you’ll be a loser. In this event, I only sporadically got out of line, and I usually waited for situations where I had my opponents drawing thin before investing a substantial portion of my stack.

Of course, this does not mean you should play overly tight, entering a pot only when you have premium cards. If you do that, you will rarely get action when you actually pick up a strong hand. As the old gambling saying goes, you have to give action to get action. Even if you’re playing somewhat conservatively, you should still raise with a reasonably wide range from late position.

You should also reraise when you expect a preflop raiser to be stealing a high percentage of the time.

For example, after being card-dead for a while, an overly loose, aggressive player raised from middle position, and I reraised to about three and a half times his bet with K- 4 offsuit from the big blind. He quickly folded, and we moved onto the next hand.

While this may not seem like any sort of impressive display of poker acumen, picking up small pots in this manner helps you build your chip stack while also allowing you to develop a table image that will make it easier for you get paid off later.

That being said, playing like a maniac against intelligent opponents is not a wise approach. Instead, play a fundamentally sound strategy, and you will fare usually well enough against any opponents you encounter.