Tournament poker play is an entirely different beast from cash game play. Tournament play varies greatly depending on a large number of factors like how far into the tournament you are, the size of your chip stack, and many others. Knowing how to play in each of these different scenarios is vital to your success when playing in poker tournaments. The very first part of tournament play you must master is early tournament play. Unless you know how to play well early on in the tournament, you will rarely get past this phase of play.

Early in the tournament, your primary focus should be growing your chip stack as quickly as you can without taking too many risks. During this phase of the tournament, there is a good deal of mediocre to poor players in most tournaments, so exploiting these people is vital to the quick growth of your chip stack. The first step to being able to exploit these players is identifying them and getting yourself involved in favorable positions with them. Players who are consistently extremely aggressive or players who treat the tournament like a cash game are usually good targets to go after during this phase of the tournament.

Knowing where the players stand at your current poker table is vital to your success in a tournament. Finding yourself in a hand with someone who is a better player and with a larger stack can lead to disaster so picking and choosing your battles is important. Try to get involved primarily with smaller stacks unless you have an extremely good hand; in which case, you should not be afraid to shove all of your chips into the middle. As long as your chip stack can grow faster than the pace of the blinds, you will be in a good position to make it into the later stages of the tournament.

If for some reason your chip stack starts to get small, you are going to have to make a move and make one quickly or you run the danger of being knocked out. Unlike in a cash game, you cannot sit around and wait forever for the cards to come to you because the blinds are constantly increasing in size. As such, if you find yourself on a short stack you need to make a quick decision on where to go all in and get your chips in the middle. Over the course of a tournament, chances are good that you are going to be all-in multiple times so picking the best opportunities to go all in will help your statistics.

Overall, the early phase of a PKR poker tournament will set you up for the rest of the tournament. By making sure that you push out the weak players and extract as much money out of them as possible while avoiding confrontations with better players, you will greatly increase your chances of seeing later stages of the tournament.