If you play poker tournaments, you need to implement good tournament strategy. The same type of decision making that you would invoke in a blackjack or 3-card poker casino game tournament. In fact, these types of decisions often need to be made regardless of what your cards are. Top tournament players know this, while good poker players who lack tournament skills usually find themselves frustrated.

I know plenty of good cash game players who refuse to even play tournaments any more. They usually say something like “You play for four hours just to go all-in.” This type of statement reflects the mindset of somebody who doesn’t enjoy tournament play because they think good poker play should be rewarded in these things. That notion will just set you up for disappointment.

Yes, good poker play often gets you off to a great start in a tournament. But as the blinds go up and the stakes keep rising, you will find yourself evenly-stacked pretty soon. At that point you will have a difficult time keeping your status by sticking to your solid poker principles. I see it all the time. A good player playing solid starting hands builds a big stack early on, and then isn’t even around after the second break. What happened? Well they probably got blinded down to a desperate situation, or somebody like me broke them with 97s while they were holding AK.

In order to do well in tournaments, you must take chances that even a total donk wouldn’t take in a cash game. The key is timing and getting good odds on your risk. You want to avoid taking these chances with hands that are likely dominated, but you simply cannot wait around as the blinds eat your stack away either. The best tournament players find ways to get their money in before their stack is so small that even if they hit they are still a short stack. This is the mistake that good cash game players who hate tournaments often make. They just can’t win playing like that, barring a series of miracles.

I am a cash-game specialist who also loves tournaments. But I understand that it’s a different game completely, as different from playing cash poker as playing dominos is. I don’t let the fact that it’s cards and poker hands deciding the chip distributions get in my way of making good tournament decisions. As a result, I tend to do well in them as well.

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This entry was posted on Friday, January 18th, 2008 at 6:53 am and is filed under strategy. You can follow any comments to this post through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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