Card Dead

[n9dream]

Hello,

What's a good strategy to deal with being card dead in MTTs? I'm consistently getting J2o and 84o. Rag aces and kings. I don't want to fold every hand, but I don't want to play crap either. Any suggestions would be welcome...

 

[dannystanks]

Sometimes you have to play spots rather than cards. Pay attention to the players and know which ones you can bluff basically and which ones you can’t. It’s a lot more complicated than this but generally this is the idea. If everyone folds to you on the button and you have crap, nobody knows that but you. There are plenty of spots to raise, re-raise, check raise, donk bet etc to try and get them off a hand. Cards? We don’t need no stinking cards lol. Good luck!

 

[MishkaZL]

Hello,

What's a good strategy to deal with being card dead in MTTs? I'm consistently getting J2o and 84o. Rag aces and kings. I don't want to fold every hand, but I don't want to play crap either. Any suggestions would be welcome...

Perhaps the best possible option is simply not to play with garbage. If you lack patience and can't wait for strong cards, then poker is a problem and you'd better find something else to do. Patience is a key skill without which you will not be able to achieve good results.

 

[n9dream]

Sometimes you have to play spots rather than cards. Pay attention to the players and know which ones you can bluff basically and which ones you can’t. It’s a lot more complicated than this but generally this is the idea. If everyone folds to you on the button and you have crap, nobody knows that but you. There are plenty of spots to raise, re-raise, check raise, donk bet etc to try and get them off a hand. Cards? We don’t need no stinking cards lol. Good luck!

Thanks for the great tip! I’ll be trying that at my next tourney!

 

[yuriko oyama]

caring about the cards you are dealt is very important, so I believe you are playing correctly.
Sometimes playing in position without big cards is possible, but depending on your stack, it can only accelerate your fall if you don't know the best moment.

 

[fundiver199]

As others have said the key strategy is patience. If the correct decision is to fold, then you need to keep on doing that, even if you have been card and/or "situation" dead for a long time. But you might also need to study preflop ranges a bit more. It sounds like, you are playing a very static range, and this is not correct. Rag aces for instance are typically always an open, if it folds to you on BTN or sometimes even CO. And if it folds to you in SB, often you can play any two cards or any two cards except complete junk. So rather than giving BB a walk, maybe you start limping in even with a hand as bad as J2o, assuming there is an ante. And maybe you need to defend your big blind significantly more.

Sometimes in an MTT session I find myself with incredibly nitty stats across tables. Like maybe my VPIP is 12% on one table, 9% on another and 13% on a third. And while its possible, I have just been card dead across tables, its also a wake-up call, that maybe I have not been paying enough attention, and maybe I have defaulted to much towards the easy decision of folding to avoid any sort of marginal spot. And this is a problem, because we dont win tournaments by being very good at playing aces or kings. Its all the other marginal spots, which separates the winners from losing or breakeven players.