Early Stage Tournament Strategy: Building Your Stack

## Early Stage Tournament Strategy The early stage of a tournament is when stacks are deep relative to the blinds, typically 50-200 big blinds. During this phase, your goal is to accumulate chips through smart play rather than survival. Gambling it up early for small gains is a common mistake. Play a tight, position-aware style in the early stage. Open strong hands from early position, widen from late position, and look for spots to outplay weaker opponents postflop. Avoid putting your entire stack at risk with one-pair hands — the blinds are too small relative to your stack to justify it. Speculative hands (suited connectors, small pairs) increase in value during the early stage because of the deep stack-to-blind ratio. The implied odds of set mining and hitting draws are excellent when you have 150+ big blinds. ## Tournament Rakeback Reminder Tournament buy-in fees count toward your rakeback tier at most rooms. When evaluating tournaments, factor in the effective discount from your rakeback percentage. A $10+$1 tournament at 40% rakeback effectively costs $10.60 after rakeback — a meaningful savings over thousands of entries.