Now let’s suppose that instead of playing a tournament with your $300, you decide to sit down and play a cash game. A good gauge of success in a cash game is to win one bet per hour. If an average bet in your game were $10, then a solid eight hours of play would net you $80. Of course, if you have a great session, you could win more than that. I think it’s safe to say, though, that no matter how great your session is, you won’t win $12,000 or anything close to that. That’s the value of tournaments. You can win a lot more money by risking the same amount.
The flip side of that is that you have to gamble a little bit. While a good measure of a cash game is winning one bet an hour, that will not cut it in a tournament. Win one bet an hour and you will be blinded out quickly. Since the blinds and antes increase at regular intervals, the action is forced. You cannot afford to sit back and wait for cards. You have to look for situations and opponents to exploit. You can manage risk in a cash game. In a tournament, you are looking to maximize profits while minimizing risk. You have to be willing to take chances you would not take in a cash game if you are going to advance. In tournaments, there will be times that you will be forced to make moves to avoid elimination. The key to success is to be creative in making some moves before you are forced to make them.
In a cash game, you are playing to win money or not lose money depending on the situation. In a tournament, your only goal is to play to win. A tournament does not end until one person has all the chips. That means that every other player will lose all his chips. Since chips in a tournament only represent value as a way to keep score, there is no incentive to save them for a better situation. Say you sit down to a cash game with $100 and are soon down to your last $20. That $20 is still real money, and there is no need to waste it on an unfavorable situation. You can walk away and pocket the $20. In cash games, it is often prudent to walk away from the table when the environment is not favorable to you.
In a tournament, if you are down to your last few chips, those chips have no value outside of the tournament. You cannot leave the table with them. You do not have the luxury of waiting for the right situation. Rather, you have to use all your cunning and skill to find a way to play those chips. At all times, you are playing to win.
In this book, we will look at various tournament structures and the optimum strategy for each. We will also look at general tournament concepts to very specific hand analysis. While every situation in poker is unique, many of the principles learned can be applied to different situations.
Home Game
The traditional home game has been turned on its head in recent years. Throughout high school, college, law school, and postgraduate, I routinely played in a home game. Back then, everything was dealer’s choice, that is, everyone had a turn to deal and could pick which game to play. Every game under the sun would come up, from simple stud to night baseball. Rarely, though, would Texas Hold’em be chosen. It was deemed too boring for most games.
The only common denominator throughout those years was that, even though the stakes were small, everyone played to win. Poker is a game designed to be played for something of monetary value. If there’s nothing at stake, it’s hard to imagine anyone playing that seriously. Well, I hadn’t played a home game in over fifteen years until this past year.
We recently moved into a new-construction neighborhood. One of the great things about a new neighborhood is that nobody knows each other and everyone is willing to have social events to get to know one another. One of the men in the neighborhood decided to organize a biweekly poker night. I had met Robert once before. He was a very friendly guy who absolutely loved watching poker on television. Of course, the only thing shown on television is Texas Hold’em tournaments. When Robert sent out his announcement to the neighborhood inviting all to a night of Texas Hold’em played just for fun, I was happy to go.
It would be a great relaxing way to meet some of the new neighbors. I had never played poker for zero stakes before, but this was meant to be much more of a social event than a poker outing. I figured I could have a few beers and offer pointers to anyone interested in learning. I didn’t think that anything remotely resembling real poker would be played. Even so, my expectations still managed to be too high. Six of us convened that first night. Of the six, four had little to no experience. When I mean little to no experience, I’m talking that they had to learn everything from square one. I certainly don’t mean this to be disparaging. They were a great group of guys who had other interests besides poker. The fifth player was Robert who had a firm understanding of the game but had never played competitively. His sole experience was limited to simulations on computer games and freerolls on websites. Nonetheless, he did understand how to play. As the host, he was very patient and understanding when teaching the rules to the other players.
It was extremely difficult to play poker that night when every hand was spent answering questions and teaching the four newbies each step of the game. Where I had hoped to offer some pointers, it was really way too premature for that. You can’t really teach strategy to someone until that person gets the hang of the game first. It ended up being a fun social night as I tried to put poker to the back of my mind. Still, I couldn’t help myself. If I am playing cards, I have to play to win. For the most part, everyone stayed in every hand, only calling but never raising. My strategy was quite simple. I only played strong hands and would raise when I did so. Sure enough, I had built up a sizable chip lead before calling it quits.
Of course, beating five guys getting together for a few beers and friendly cards is nothing to brag about, especially when none of them seemed to have any ambition to win. They were there solely to have a good time and rightfully so. That night only confirmed my belief that poker has to be played for something in order for people to take it seriously.
I missed the next couple of sessions but showed up about a month later. I was somewhat surprised at how the game had changed. Before the game was played like a cash game (with no value); now there was structure. We would be playing a single-table no limit Hold’em tournament. The blinds would increase at regular intervals, and once you were eliminated, it was off to play pool. Now I am not going to sit here and try to tell you that everyone had turned into Doyle Brunson overnight. In fact, the level of play was just about what you would expect from people just learning the game.
Players were still struggling with the rules more than anything else. However, I saw a big fundamental difference from that first time: everyone was playing to win. It was a friendly fun game, but everyone was playing in earnest. I’m not sure if it was the prospect of being the first one eliminated (and having to play pool by yourself) or the pure competitive desire to win that was driving people. But there was no mistaking the fact that everyone was trying to play the best he could.
Now this made things interesting for me. I love the game and I’m always looking for ways to improve. I was curious if I could learn anything to help my game. Still, the game did present a few challenges. Most of the players had tightened up considerably from the first time. Players were not just blindly playing every hand. Only one player, Pierre, was intent on playing a lot of hands. If he had any piece of the flop, he bet or raised. If he missed the flop completely, he still called down to the end 80 percent of the time.
Now as anybody who’s played the game knows, if you play a lot of hands, you are going to win a lot of pots. In fact, you can have some fairly significant upside swings. This situation only serves to reinforce the behavior, which is why so many beginning players fall into this trap. Of course, at the end of the day, anyone playing this loose is destined to lose all his chips. Watching Pierre play, I thought of what I think is my biggest weakness. When I get a big stack, I have a tendency to play too loose. This is something I have known for a while and continue to work on. However, to see Pierre make such a common beginner’s mistake was a real eye-opener for me.
When I get a big stack while playing in bigger tournaments, things are obviously going well for me. Yet, I was falling into the same beginner’s trap of starting to feed off that positive reinforcement, that is, I’m winning hands, so I should play more of them. Now there are times to play more aggressively with a large stack in a tournament. Yet, I still need to be selectively aggressive