![]() ![]() To give these peaks a value, let’s assign them a 9 or 10 on a scale of 10. In a tournament, you want to reach high peaks, even at the expense of also incurring a lot of valleys. When I refer to “peaks,” I am referring to your aggregate results over all of the hands that it takes to complete a tournament. Loose players have higher peaks and lower valleys. This is why some losing or break-even players in cash games can occasionally do quite well in a tournament. You can even argue that higher variance is preferable even if the earn rate per hand is slightly less. Loose players win tournaments tight players hope to make the money. Will that be enough to beat a field of 1,500 players, or 800 players? The answer is: probably not. ![]() Let’s say that you are lucky and get double your fair share of premium hands. Of course, it will be very difficult to win all of those hands. You can expect A-K about six times and A-Q about six times. How many premium hands do you hope to get in the tournament? You should get dealt aces a couple of times, kings a couple of times, and so on. In the live event, you might get dealt about 500 hands, and about the same in the online event only 500 hands for the victory, the glory, and the big cash! Imagine a WSOP preliminary event with 1,500 entrants played in about 25 hours, or an online event with 800 players played over eight hours. To succeed in tournaments, you must be winning them or at least coming very close to winning to reap the big profits. Generally, only 10 percent of the players get paid, and most of them earn only modest profits. Tournaments are structured so that practically all of the money goes to the top three spots. There is one major aspect of tournaments that changes completely the way the game is played: payout structures. Most beginning to intermediate players play on a limited bankroll, so less variance is always better, given the same earn rate. They generally are seeing flops with the better hands, which gives them a tremendous edge.īy playing tight, they also reduce their variance, which is helpful for most players’ bankrolls. Eventually, most players learn that a tight-aggressive strategy can reap big profits. As they lose, they start to learn that playing fewer hands is generally a better strategy. The biggest mistake players make when starting out is playing too many hands. For the purposes of this column, I am referring to full-ring cash games, since this is comparable to tournament play until the final two tables. The difference is something much deeper, as it has a lot to do with style. If they are smart enough to succeed at particular variants of the game, shouldn’t they be smart enough to learn the subtle differences between each? Granted, these little discrepancies shouldn’t be too hard for smart players to figure out. ![]() Of course, there are a lot of intricacies that differentiate cash games from tournaments – things such as limited stack sizes, no rebuys, blinds to stack ratios, increasing blinds, and bubble play, just to name a few. Why is this? A hand of Texas hold’em is played the same, whether you play in tournaments or cash games. And, of course, there are many cash-game specialists at the higher levels whom we have never heard of. But for every one of them, there are dozens of popular professionals who specialize in specific formats, such as Phil Hellmuth, Chris “Jesus” Ferguson, and Mike Matusow. Of course there are exceptions, such as Doyle Brunson, Daniel Negreanu, and Phil Ivey, who succeed at the highest levels in both cash games and tournaments. Generally, most poker players are specialists. Or, maybe they specialize in online multitable tournaments. Maybe they specialize in small-stakes no-limit hold’em cash games. Maybe they play sit-and-go tournaments on the Internet all of the time. Maybe they travel the tournament trail around the country, playing the World Poker Tour and World Series of Poker Tournament Circuit events. Generally, you find players who are specialists. Tournament versus cash-game strategy Very few players succeed in both tournaments and cash games. ![]()
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