Turbo Tournament Strategy

Turbo No Limit Hold Em Tournaments are another version of tournaments that are becoming very popular on the internet. Players like this version particularly because turbo tournaments usually finish in a third of the time it takes to finish a standard No Limit Hold Em Tournament. Strategically, we see that at 6-max tournaments, players must play looser because the blinds are going to hit them 33% quicker than at 9-man tournaments.

Now, think about a turbo tournament. The blinds are not going to hit each player quicker, but the blinds are going to be increasing over 50% faster than during normal tournaments. This means that not only do players have to play more aggressively than they would in a normal tournament to maintain their stack, but they also have to play more aggressively than they would in a 6-max tournament. That means players have to accept the fact that risk is inevitable and luck may play an important role in the outcome.

Strategy

The only strategy that remains the same is the early stage strategy. In the early stages, players can still either sit back and wait for the blinds to increase, playing premium hands, or mix it up with speculative hands. Once blinds increase and become a larger portion of the stacks, player should start to push good pre-flop hands all-in to pick up the large blinds.

Players must be willing to gamble to keep up with the quick pace of the increasing blinds. Players should try to get into situation where either they are ahead when called, or when it is a coin flip with dead money in the pot. For example, if a player opens the pot for a raise and then another player comes over the top all in, players should still stick it all in with AK, even if they knew the second player has QQ. The pot is already huge and it is probably coin flip.

Since all the chips a player has are going to be very valuable, players should try not to raise a fold to a reraise. Players should mostly only raise if they plan only calling a reraise, especially since players coming over the top with a 3-bet is going to be expected. Unfortunately, the increasing blinds means that luck is going to have a much greater role in these types of tournaments. Because of this, variance is also going to be greater, so players should not be surprised when they miss the money 10+ times in a row.