First of all, what does it mean to play ‘tight’? In poker, playing tight means that you limit yourself to sticking in hands when you know that you’ve got a really good hand and are pretty sure that you stand a good chance of winning with it. If you are playing tight, that means that you often fold early in the game.

On the one hand, this can be a good strategy because if you know that your hand doesn’t have much chance of winning, why would you enter more money into the pot instead of folding? If you fold early when you know that you haven’t got a chance of winning, you haven’t lost anything additional on that hand.

If you don’t fold, but continue to play, you will end up losing money in the game overall because you stay in at the beginning, entering money once or even twice, and inevitably lose at the end. When this happens, you’ve automatically lost all that you entered. This is one good reason to play tight; refraining from betting saves you money.

In poker, it’s about winning money, and even though saving money can add up to a kind of win in the end, you shouldn’t be thinking in terms of saving money at the beginning of a poker tournament. Instead, you should be thinking about winning; thinking about winning and how you are going to do it is the first step to actually winning in the end. The better your strategy, the better your chance of winning, and poker is not about saving, but winning.

In order to start creating a winning tournament strategy, you have to think in terms of the whole tournament. While playing tight might equal saving money and being, therefore, smart about your play, you are also giving your opponents a lot of information about you if you play tight. Players who play tight are easy to read because they are repeatedly folding when they have a bad hand—in poker that means they’re folding almost every time they are dealt a hand. What this does is tell all of your opponents that if you have a good hand, you won’t fold. The moment you don’t fold, everyone else does and your winnings are less than minimal. This is not the position you want to find yourself in, specifically; you want your opponents to not know what you have in your hand. If your opponents think that they know what you have, you have violated the first rule of poker: be deceptive.

Of course, you don’t have to be deceptive or be deceiving, but your opponents should, definitely not, be able to ‘read you’ like a book. If they can read you like a book, you have absolutely no chance of winning. The quickest way for them to learn to read you like a book is to play tight in the beginning of a tournament. Once you’ve done this, you’ve just about guaranteed yourself a loss, and a big one at that! Keep your play, if not deceptive, at least keep it varied so that nobody knows what you have and what your next move will be. If you keep everyone guessing you will be able to fool everyone, and that is absolutely the best way to play a good poker game and to win at it.

To succeed in poker, whether at tournaments or among friends, you must be able to keep your secrets. Playing tight reveals all of your secrets quicker than any other playing style; stay away from it, especially when the stakes are high!