Because tournament poker is so radically different from cash game poker then sometimes it can be difficult to shift your mental state across to the other form of poker properly if you have played them both in a relatively short time frame. Tournament players that drop into my games while waiting for a tournament to start or because they have nothing else to do are a major revenue source for me.

Because the pay off seats in tournaments are very heavily weighted towards the top three places, this means that many players who are playing the tournament will rightly or wrongly be taking very substantial risks to try and accumulate chips.

It is an obvious fact that the player that wins the tournament ends up with all the chips. But a tournament is over in a relatively short time frame which means that the players have not got time to hang around. Keep in mind that I am not referring to SNG’s here. This means that many players will be taking risks and going into marginal situations looking to double up because the clock is ticking and other players are increasing their stacks and you run the risk of becoming short stacked if you wait for strong hands and good situations for too long.

Because of this fact then many players shift from tournament poker play to cash game play and don’t slow down enough. I play aggressively in certain situations and often with absolute junk but I am not doing it all the time, I am a long way removed from being overbearingly aggressive. But these super aggressive tournament players are my favourite because they have one gear and one gear only and that gear is fast. They don’t seem to realise that many of them could in fact be successful online poker players if they would only stop haemorrhaging money in the cash games.

The reverse is true of course and many cash game players lose in tournaments simply because they play their same plodding cash game strategy when they sit in a tournament. They play a cash game style and get quite deep into the tournament just missing the money and then think that they were unlucky and that they will eventually win one of them…..an illusion!!

The experienced but not necessarily great tournament players have correctly figured out that rather than just limp in to the money places short stacked, the best way is to simply go for it and take risks and try to accumulate that big stack that will take you to the final table and beyond. This is the type of poker that many players see on television, rapidly escalating blinds with big jumps in prize money from one place to the next. This leads many of them to get a totally skewed view of just what is exactly happening.

This is something that you yourself are going to have to guard against if you start to move from tournaments to cash games and vice versa. It is not so critical with SNG’s but you still have to be careful all the same. It can be even more of a problem online where the sheer ease of being able to bet or call is made all that much simpler by not having to physically move chips, all that needs to be done is to click a mouse.

It can be frighteningly easy to simply get swept along with the momentum of online poker and especially when players are multi-tabling and many even multi-table when playing tournaments. This is fine if you are a net plus player but I feel that many players get seduced by this speed and actually get high from it some of them. Then they go into a cash game and need to slow down but cannot do it straight away.

It is a bit like doing high speeds on a motorway for several hours to then come off the motorway onto a much slower road. Before you know it you are travelling fifty miles per hour in a thirty zone because you have not mentally adjusted yet to the decreased pace. This is something that you will definitely need to be aware of if you also start to play a substantial amount of tournaments. Don’t let excellent cash game results be ruined by your craving to play for a big prize pool, many people have made this mistake and paid the penalty for it.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.