You’ve just sat down to play in your first WSOP Main Event with one goal: to reach the final table. Okay, so how are you going to achieve that? Leaving the endgame to one side for now, your first goal should be to accumulate a lot of chips. There are numerous approaches to chip accumulation and the style you employ will depend on your personal playing traits and how your table is playing. Let's look at three common chip accumulation approaches…
1. Limping
With this approach your objective is to limp and see as many cheap flops as you possibly can, including calling small raises with a wide range of hands to take advantage of your opponent's post-flop mistakes. Let's say you limp in for 100 on the button with 6-5 offsuit and two other limpers before you. The big blind, who has pocket Aces, makes it 400 to go, both limpers call and you do as well. The flop comes K-6-5. The pocket Aces guy bets 1,200 into the 1,600 pot. The other two players fold. You make it 3,500 to go and your opponent snap-shoves without thinking through the hand. You call and win his stack.
In order to pull this off, you need to be a very disciplined post-flop player. Make sure you don’t just weakly call off your chips.
2. Small ball
This is the approach commonly used by many pros. It’s similar to the limping strategy, with the exception that the small-baller will take control of the action with small pre-flop raises and post-flop bets. The goal is to force post-flop mistakes by raising and betting, while also giving you space to bluff. In the first example you're relying on actually hitting flops. The small ball approach, however, keeps your opponents continuously guessing as you are constantly applying small stabbing pressure.
3. Big pot
If you're not quite so comfortable with post-flop play, this is the approach you should consider. A player using this approach will only play big hands or play hands in position. The idea is to get as much money in the pot pre-flop so that post-flop decisions are relatively simple. Say you have pocket Kings and someone opens to 300. Rather than just making a standard raise to 1,000, you makes it 1,800 to go. You’re looking to get all your money in pre-flop if possible, and if you’re just called you know that most likely the rest of the money, or a good chunk of it, is going in on the flop. Believe it or not there is actually some merit to this approach because of the hyper-aggressive nature of today's players. A surprising number of players would have no problem calling a raise that is over 10% of their stack because, after all, they have ‘implied odds’.