In a normal poker tournament, good players avoid close gambles because they don’t make sense mathematically. Doubling your chip count doesn’t nearly help you as much as losing all of your chips hurts you, because regular tournaments use a graded percentage payout structure. Say you start a $100 buy-in tournament with 100 players in it, that pays $4,000 to the winner and distributes the remainder of the prize money to the rest of the final table players. At the beginning of the tournament, each one of your 100 chips is worth $1. If you go on to win the tournament, each one of the 10,000 chips you won is worth only 40 cents. As you accumulate more chips, each one goes down in value.

In a winner-take-all satellite, this concept doesn’t apply, because there is only one prize. You should be willing to gamble in spots where you have a small edge. If you had 77 in the big blind and your opponent went all in for a very large raise from the small blind and flashed you an AK-suited (this is illegal in live tournaments and impossible online, but humor me for theory’s sake), you would call in a heartbeat. Your 77 is a little better than a 52/48 favorite. In fact, if he offered you the chance to play for only half of your stack instead of your whole stack and to allow him to do the same (again, this would never happen in an actual tournament), you would tell him “Heck no. I’m a favorite in this hand. Why would I want to lower the stakes?” In a normal tournament, you would have a difficult decision over whether to take the same gamble, because your chips decrease in value as you accumulate more of them.

Another reason you might pass up a small edge early in a regular tournament is you will probably have a chance to get your money into the pot in a better situation later in the tournament. This assumes you are one of the best players in the tournament, as it will necessitate you outplaying some opponents down the stretch. That logic makes sense, but in a winner-take-all tournament it might be worth it for the best players to take some gambles early, so they have a bigger stack to work with if they do survive. This will enable the better players to take control of the table and see more flops (most good players want to play all of the streets in Hold’em, not just pre-flop).

When I have a big stack in these winner-take-all satellites, I make it a point to play a lot of pots with the other big stacks at my table if they’re the kind of player I could double up off of.

If you had a very large stack late in a super satellite you would probably try to avoid playing hands against other players with big stacks. In a winner-take-all satellite, you should go out of your way to try to play a pot with another big stack. Doubling up against them would put you in a commanding chip position.

In the winner-take-all World Series of Poker satellite I won in 2005, I was chip leader with about 25 players out of the original 280 left and I purposely tried to see a lot of flops with the second largest chip stack. If he raised, I would call with small pairs or suited connectors and try to bust him. Occasionally, this gave me a good opportunity to steal from him as well. I finally got him when I flopped a set with my 99. He had 77 and was tired of me winning pots against him, so he check-raised me all-in on a flop of 9-T-3 and I was happy to call him. I made it to the final table with more than 50 percent of the chips in play. Had this been a super satellite, I would have folded the hand pre-flop. If this situation occurred in a regular tournament, it would have been a difficult decision.

You should also be stealing as much as possible without drawing a lot of attention to yourself. It’s okay to be labeled as an aggressive player by your opponents, but you don’t want them to think you’re a maniac. You want them to both respect and fear you. Being the bettor rather than the caller gives you two chances to win the hand: having the best hand at showdown or getting your opponent to fold. So once the ante kicks in, raise with a speculative hand at least once an orbit, if not twice, as long as you are getting some respect. Don’t be afraid to follow through with a bet on the flop if you missed it. This is a rare type of tournament where the reward for winning a pot is greater than the consequences of losing additional chips.

You should do what you can to accumulate a big stack in a winner-take-all tournament, but that doesn’t mean all hope is lost if you get knocked down to a small stack. Hundreds of players come back from having short stacks to win poker tournaments every day. If you find yourself with a short stack try to recognize which players will call all-in short stacks with marginal hands and which ones will fold. If your stack contains three big blinds or less, recognize that you will almost certainly be called by the big blind, because he has the pot odds to do so. In that case, try to wait until you have a reasonably good hand, unless a high-ante structure is bleeding away your chips quickly. If you don’t get any good hands before you have to post the big blind, you must call all-in on that hand. Folding will bring you down to a two big blind stack or less, which is a point where doubling up doesn’t really help you that much. You are pot-committed.

Finally, you should always keep this in mind when playing a winner-take-all satellite: Getting knocked out is no big deal! There’s no shame in getting knocked out in the first hour. You get the same prize as the guy who finished second, it just took him a lot longer to do it. Often these types of tournaments are freerolls anyway. Just make sure that if you go down, you go down swinging.