A bad tournament concept

In a percentage pay off tournament most players would try to eliminate as many opponents as they can to get closer to the prize money. But this is a wrong concept, early on in a game you shouldn’t really be worried about knocking off players out of the tournament. In the beginning of a tournament you must never try to change your strategies just so that you can eliminate your opponent.

Some second guessing.

It might happen at times that when you do not try to knock off a player that could have been easily knocked off the other players would get annoyed at you. In a situation if you raise the bet to attempt to knock out an opponent in most situations you would end up loosing a lot of money by playing hands that were worth not playing in the first place. If your main goal is to knock off other players then you end up not concentrating on your own hands and playing logically.

What this would mean is that there is more to loose in trying to eliminate players rather than winning. On an average you would only be able to knock off an opponent once for every 8 to 10 times that you try and for every time that you do not succeed you would end up wasting a lot of your own valuable money.

Eliminating opponents

when there isn’t a major advantage you should never try to make a large raise in an attempt to get someone out of the game. Even when you have a lot of chips and the opponent only has a few and the opponent puts in his all, which is a pittance in any case, you must not call just for the sake of it. Only in the later stages of the tournaments it is beneficial to eliminate opponents.  

In any case the benefit from eliminating a player early on is not as great as you might think it is. In fact, you would still be in the same position as the remaining competitors.  It is actually quite silly to sacrifice your own money in the beginning just to try to get someone out. When an opponent is eliminated the small stacks get more benefit from it rather than the big ones because they would then be able to climb up the money ladder to get a place at the final table.

Most players argue that they try to eliminate opponents because they otherwise might get back to them. This is quite silly because if you actually call in an attempt to get them out and loose then they would certainly come back to beat you and they would then have more money to do it too. In any case when you would be out of the tournament it doesn’t even matter much, and you would soon be out of the tournament if you loose too much money over trying to get others out.

There is fact no logical reason supporting the advice that you should try to eliminate all the players. What matters is whether it is logical to give up your profitable strategy to just make an effort to eliminate an opponent and whether or not doing that would actually give you a better pay off.

In the later stages where there are only fewer players remaining and the benefits are too high it is often worth it to try and get the players out. In the early stages it doesn’t make much sense.