I had a real breakthrough in Tourney success on Friday night. I played in four tournaments and made the money in three of them and made the final table in two of those. I placed 4th in a $11 tourney of 255 players at Hollywood Poker, 8th in a $5 rebuy tournament of 162 players at Absolute Poker and 98th in a $2 tournement of 1,990 players at Pokerstars. I have really been working on my tournament play and I am pleased with this breakthrough. The key change I made to the game was becoming more proactive about "avoiding trouble". Let me explain. First of all, what I have learned from a couple sources (described later) is that the true magic of tournament play is "hanging around". I always thought I needed to constantly accumulate chips and was therefore taking far to many risks. Additionally, I was playing too many marginal hands from early and mid-position. During these three tournaments while tables that were full-handed, I never played AT, KQ, KJ, A(any below J) from any position but the button or blinds. These hands are "danger" hands in tourneys that will either win a little pot or lose a very big pot. That is a disaster in tournaments. In good tournament play, your chips will come in bunches when you get power hands as opposed to coming in a steady stream. For instance, in the Hollywood Poker tournament I had a couple of big hands early and got into the top 10 in chip stacks. However, then I did not get any cards again for quite some time. During that stretch I stole a few hands to slightly grow my chip stack, but generally was just hanging around while others caught up and passed my chip stack. I was around an average chip stack when we reached the money. During the next hour I only caught one big hand and ended up at the final table with the smallest chipstack, but not terribly undermanned. However, by continuing a tight hyper aggressive approach I leapfrogged a few other stacks and made it to 4th in the tournament. If you are serious about tournament play, I would suggest a couple of tools to improve your play: 1. Harrington's NL Tournament Books - Harrington is a tight aggressive player with a real practical sense about progressing in tournaments. The books are loaded with example hands from actual tournaments and and follow-up advice on how Dan would have paid them. These books are the best hands I have read for tournament play. 2. www.uncoverpoker.com - I got lucky to find this site about 2 weeks ago when one of the founders approached me about a link exchange. This site was started by two very good British online players; actionjack, an outstanding tourney player and sealey, a great NL cash game player. On the site, you can buy copies of videos that place you in the chair with actionjack during actual online tournaments. actionjack explains his thought process during the hands which is a very valuable learning device. I bought the "avoiding trouble" and "playing positions" videos and they were very helpful in improving my decision-making. 3. Wilson Software's Tournament Texas Hold'em - I love the improvements they recently made to the software. You can now choose from several online tournament formats for tournament play. If you want to put a new playing style into practice quickly, this is an outstanding tool. I was able to similate about 50 online tournaments over a one week period and place in the money in 40% of them. This gave me confidence that my new playing style would work. I highly recommend this software if you are serious about tournaments. I will keep you posted as I continue to progress in tournament play.

Source: Betting for Value