WHEN do you start loosening up ?

[Tosh]

I'm talking about the Party Multis here. Say you are in a 400 person limit tournament, and play tight for the first hour getting your stack up to about 2000. Do you now start making more aggressive plays to steal ? Do you keep waiting ?

Or should I be playing more loose early on anyway ?

Advice here is appreciated because I always seem to get half way through with a decent sized stack but blow it soon after.

[TheGrifter]

How loose you play in the middle stages of a tourney should be a function of your stack size and the table/tournament stage.

In terms of your stack you should always work to maintain an average stack throughout the tournament, if you fall too far below the average then other players can sense your desparation and will call you when you are forced to make a move.

If your table contains a lot of big stacks then you will probably be better off playing a tight/selectively aggressive game rather than gambling too much, however if you are one of the larger stacks then you certainly want to use that to your advantage and bet anytime you think you have near a 50/50 shot of winning (either by having the best hand, or believing your opponent will fold)..just remember, that even if you are playing big stacks you cannot allow yourself to become too short-stacked, it is better to go out betting then get blinded out as time goes on.

[Greg (FossilMan)]

How loose you should play has almost nothing (directly) to do with the size of your stack. In fact, I don't even think in terms of tight or loose when considering my own play. I use those terms as part of my mental labels of my opponents, but not myself. Well, I will consider whether my opponents have likely labelled me as tight or loose.

What I believe you should strive to do is to play each hand in the moment. If there is a great chance to take a pot down right now with a raise, then maybe it doesn't really matter what cards you have. So, in a sense you can raise very loosely that hand. In other situations, you might not play anything less than AA, so of course you're tight that hand. But it's not because your current stack size, relative to the field, dictates it. It's because the play of your opponents, right now, this hand, dictates it.

Play each hand for itself. Consider what your opponents probably are thinking about you at the moment as part of that. And you can also consider how they're likely to think of you in the future as well, though that should be only a minor factor in your decision.

Later, Greg Raymer (FossilMan)