After you have had some tournament experience with at least some success, I highly recommend playing the low buy-in re-buy tournaments at party poker, where you will find a lot of weak opponents, excellent blind structure, and decent prize pools for final table play.

The 3 and 6 dollar tourneys are a little deceiving because virtually nobody does just a single buy-in. It is not unusual to see 3 to 1 ratio of re-buys to entries. So going into a 6 dollar tourney is like a 15 or 20 dollar tournament in terms of the prize pool. That is how you should look at it as well. Go into these things with the idea of spending at least 6 to 10 rebuys. Think of it this way; You are in a regular tournament and at the end of the first hour you will be able purchase the right to be chip leader.

I am only concentrating on the first hour of play here because after that, regular tournament acumen and practice should be your guide. However, whilst following these strategies, you will be yielding a healthy stack at that time, and basic tight aggressive play will bring you to the money at the very least.

Most party poker players know this, but there is a glitch in the software which allows you to re-buy every time you go all in. If you haven’t been taking advantage of this, you are surely passing up a key strategy for these tournaments. For example, if you are holding AKs on the button and an aggressive player min raised at the cutoff prompting you to re-raise all in, click the re-buy button immediately after your reraise. A window will pop up asking you to approve the re-buy just as if you were busted out. No other site allows you to do this and it results in multiple re-buys that build the prize pool exponentially.

There are several things you need to do in these poker tournaments. Rebuy as soon as you sit at the table. You are allowed to add one if your stack is 3000 or less. Add a rebuy every time you go all in on a hand, while the hand is in play, and every time your stack happens to dip below the 3000 chip level.

During the first 15 minutes you should be seeing most flops, calling or raising it doesn’t matter. The idea is to see a flop with potential, and push all in while doing the rebuy. You may lose, but as soon as you win one you are up to 12000 (minimum) in chips quite fast. 12,000? Yes. This is how it works. Your original stack of 3000 plus a rebuy brings you to 6000. You go all in against a player that has 3000 and while you are winning his stack, you add another rebuy of 3000.

Now once you get to 12,000 in chips, you want to pick your all-ins more carefully in regards to who you are playing against. With marginal and drawing hands, push all in against single stacks of 3000 only. When you have a real power hand then you want to be up against other stacks your size or even larger.

Now as the rebuy hour winds down, you should be moving into protection mode here, because you just won’t be able to rebuild in the last few minutes as easily. Further, your goal is to head into the second hour as one of the chip leaders so you want to be extra careful in giving away your advantage in the last minute. This means essentially, staying far away from the other big stacks. Attack the rocks, attack the small stacks, be heads up, if at all when you are big stack.