Professional poker writers have often advised to run a few hands that either make you appear like a complete idiot or at least a slow player that will pass chips away at some point in the tournament. The concept behind this is that you’re kind of preparing the stage for a bigger pot at a later time when someone thinks you have zero but in fact you have a very strong hand.
If you work on creating the picture of a poor player, it can make you money, because your antagonists will be inclined to play weaker cards against you, permitting you to harvest huge pots because of their mistakes. There is nothing at all defective with that strategy for cash games and expensive buy-in tournaments, yet most internet tournaments that begin with only 1500 chips and that makes your image budget exceedingly tight.
You might even say that there is zero image budget in the early stages of a tournament and although this may seem too conservative to you, it is likely the most effectual, so as to avoid spending chips where you really don’t need. One of the reasons you don’t need to build an image in online tournaments, is because there are just too many weak players who really wouldn’t be attentive to your strategies anyway.
It is the same foolish donkeys who will also think nothing of re-raising you to the point where pots are just too big to play to the river, and that is exaclty where you need to show your weak hand to represent yourself as a poor player. Listen, there are so many weak players in the early stages, even if you play like a mouse you are very likely to still get paid off on your big hands. It is not extraordinary to advance past the first hour of a tournament after running only a few rounds showing strong pairs each time.
It’s way more effective to become predatory and show yourself as a risk taker type of player in the middle and later stages of the tournament, when your tournament stack can afford it, your adversaries are really paying attention, and the players that remain are actually fighting for some decent prize money. Only at this stage should you throw in a few hands that will confuse your antagonists.
