Preflop strategy for tournament poker: where most of your edge is made

Preflop strategy decides most of the money you make in a tournament before a single community card is dealt. It is the one decision you face on every hand, and because it sets the range, the pot size, and the position you play the rest of the hand from, small errors here compound through every street that follows. The core skill is matching your action to two things at once: where you sit relative to the button, and how deep you are in big blinds. A hand that is a routine button open at 40 BB is a fold from under the gun and an open-shove at 10 BB. Get the preflop decision right and the post-flop spots get easier, because you consistently enter pots with the range advantage, the initiative, and a plan.

This guide covers the preflop decisions that actually move your chip stack: how wide to open from each seat, when to three-bet for value versus as a light re-steal, when to four-bet or get it all in, and the recurring special spots. That means squeezes, isolating limpers, blind defense, and the stack-depth adjustments that turn set-mining into shove-or-fold. The hands that follow are drills on each of these, so treat the rules below as the framework and the hands as live reps.

Preflop opening ranges and raise sizing by position

Your opening range should widen the closer you get to the button, and widen further still when antes sweat extra dead money into every pot. Position is leverage. The later you act, the fewer players are left to wake up with a hand and the more often a steal simply takes the blinds. That is why a seat under the gun clears only your premiums and strong broadways, while the button can open a huge slice of playable hands profitably.

• Early position is tight. Open the hands that play well against everyone behind you and stand up to a three-bet.
• Late position opens far wider. Suited gappers, weak aces, and any two broadways become first-in raises because the steal equity carries them.
• With antes in play, open even wider from the cutoff and button. The extra dead money means a steal needs to work less often to print, so marginal hands clear a bar they would fail without antes.
• Blind versus blind, raise first-in with a wide range. Against a single opponent most hands are strong enough, and limping just surrenders the initiative you would otherwise hold.

Raise to a consistent size that sets up the pot you want, typically 2 to 2.5 BB with antes, and never make a raise so large that you cannot fold to pressure unless you intend to be committed.

Three-betting: value, light re-steals, and when to flat instead

When someone has already raised, the gap concept governs your response: you need a stronger hand to raise a raise than to open one. Sort your continuing range into three buckets. Three-bet your strongest hands for value. This grows the pot while you are ahead and seizes the initiative, ideally in position. Three-bet light against players who open too wide, but pick the right bluffs: blocker and suited hands that fold out chunks of their range and still flop equity when they call. The worst light three-bets are offsuit junk with no blocker value and no playability.

Not every strong-ish hand wants to three-bet. Medium pairs and suited connectors often play best as in-position flat calls against a raise, keeping the pot manageable and your range disguised. This is not a four-bet-or-fold world. The exception is out of the small blind: with a player still to act behind you and a guaranteed positional disadvantage, prefer three-betting or folding to flat-calling. Calling out of position with someone left to squeeze you is the weakest of the three options.

Four-bets, getting it in, and the squeeze

Do not slow-play aces or kings against aggression. When the action is heating up, four-bet your premiums for value and get the money in while you hold the best hand. Slow-playing only invites the multiway pots that crack big pairs. The same logic raises your big pairs preflop in general: thinning the field protects them and building the pot collects value.

A-K is the canonical get-it-in hand. Facing a three-bet it usually four-bets, because it is ahead of most three-betting ranges and prefers building the pot with initiative to flatting out of position. Facing a four-bet against an aggressive opponent, A-K shoves: you collect fold equity plus your equity when called, which beats both folding and flat-calling. The cold four-bet bluff belongs in this family. With an ace-blocker like A-5 suited against an aggressive three-bettor, you block their premiums and credibly represent a monster, making the bluff land far more often than a random hand would.

The squeeze is one of the most profitable preflop weapons. When a raise gets flat-called in front of you, make a large three-bet. The caller is capped, because he would usually have three-bet his strongest hands, and the original raiser is often stealing, so both fold too often. You can squeeze for value with real hands and squeeze light when the math says fold equity, not card strength, drives the play. A light squeeze against a raiser plus a flat-caller works precisely because both ranges are too weak to continue against the pressure.

Blind defense, isolating limpers, and the cold-call trap

Defend the big blind wide against cheap late-position steals. You are getting a discount because you have already posted, and you close the action with no one left behind to raise. Both factors justify continuing with many playable hands you would fold elsewhere. The price and your closing position, not raw hand strength, make these calls correct.

Against limpers, do the opposite of joining them. Raise to isolate weak limpers with strong, dominating hands. You get heads-up and in position rather than limping along into a multiway pot where your edge shrinks. And beware the cold-call trap. Flatting a raise with aggressive players still to act invites squeezes and dominated post-flop spots. With a marginal hand in that situation, prefer folding or three-betting to a passive cold-call that leaves you exposed.

Knowing when to let go is part of the same skill. A-Q offsuit out of position folds to a solid three-bet. It is dominated by the value range and plays poorly without position, so save your calls and four-bets for clearly aggressive opponents. And when a light three-bet gets four-bet, usually fold: the bluff failed, and reloading behind it out of position just throws good chips after bad.

Adjusting preflop play to stack depth: from set-mining to shove-or-fold

Stack depth rewrites every rule above. Set-mining needs deep stacks for the implied-odds payoff. You flop a set roughly one in eight and a half, so you need the chips behind to make it worth calling. With deep stacks, a small pair calls cheaply and folds without hesitation when it misses, and a multiway pot only boosts those implied odds. But short-stacked, that same small pair is a shove-or-fold hand, not a call-and-pray hand, because there is no implied-odds payoff when stacks are shallow.

• Around 10 BB in late position, the game becomes push-or-fold. Open-shove your playable hands instead of making a committing raise you cannot fold to a jam.
• Calling an all-in is a pure equity-versus-price decision. Wide shoving ranges make strong-but-not-premium hands clear calls when you are getting the right odds, even though you would never open-shove some of them yourself.
• Deeper, near 40 BB and up, you have room for the full toolkit. Flats, light three-bets, and four-bet bluffs all reappear because there are streets left to play.

The thread running through all of it: read your stack in big blinds first, then your position, then the specific opponents, and let those three inputs pick the play. The hands below are the drills. Each one isolates a single preflop decision, an open by position, a value three-bet, a squeeze, a short-stack shove, a disciplined fold, so work through them as live reps and build the instinct to make the right preflop choice automatically.