At this time, there are many styles of play that can get the job done in
poker tournaments ,from the sit and wait style to the get busy early style, it is hard to distinguish which style is the most successful. It has often been argued that poker tournaments are similar to SNG’s and are just expanded versions of them. Or looking at this another way, SNG’s are merely compressed poker tournaments.
There is a lot of merit to this view as SNG’s and large MTT’s do have many similarities. They have a prize structure that favours the higher end of the ladder. The winner of an SNG traditionally gets 50% of the prize pool with the second and third place players getting the other 50% and the rest of the field gets nothing!
This top heavy prize pool is similar to tournament poker as well where the majority of the prize money goes to the top three seats. This leads to various players implementing various styles of play and the most common style is to start playing very tightly and try to allow the crazy players and the crazy action to fizzle out. This leaves you in a situation where you have outlasted a good percentage of the field and are now into the tournaments middle stages.
The idea is not to get involved unless you have a premium hand or a very strong hand. Then you slowly open up the aggression levels as the tournament gets deeper and the blinds get higher. Your blind to stack ratio will be such that your number of moves will be limited and you are now looking to make moves to accumulate chips.
However this style of play does have drawbacks, it will not allow you to get a big stack early in the competition. The early stages of the tournament are where the real dead money is and the novice tournament players who may be in their hundreds if the field is large enough will be passing their chips to someone and you will not be in enough pots to take advantage of that.
It is for this reason that many online tournament professionals play a far faster style of play. They don’t want to be on the curve or behind the curve but considerably ahead of it. They would rather be out of the competition than treading water until the inevitable knockout arrives.
In the tournaments that I played (which wasn’t all that many as I am essentially a cash game specialist) then I would say that my own style fell somewhere between the two styles. Whichever style you choose comes down to personal choice. For instance in his great book “Every Hand Revealed”, Gus Hansen even stated that there is little to choose between the two styles and much of it comes down to preference.
I have known some of the tightest poker players you could ever wish to meet, take down large MTT events. They didn’t open up until the final two tables but they survived by playing tightly and then a good run of cards came for them at just the right time. I have known numerous players who were very uncomfortable at the prospect of playing short handed but that still didn’t stop them from cashing very highly indeed.
In fact if you have won your way into a tournament by a satellite or by utilising your frequent player points then the return on investment could be very substantial indeed.
This article was written by Carl “The Dean” Sampson
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