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

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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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Aside from asking a question, I would like to express my gratitude to you for I find your articles and Q&A section really useful and helpful. Thanks a lot! I love going over them.

Well, here’s my question: Is there any tip in particular that you can give me about being patient while in a tournament or simple game plays? I learned patience is something a player should possess.

Hope to hear from you soon.

Regards,
Tom
Tom,

Keep yourself occupied by watching the action going on at the table if you are in a live game. There is a lot of information that you can pick up from other players. Focus on this while trying to find a hand. If you are online, one thing I do to keep patient is to play a second game or even a couple of additional games. This keeps me focused and playing solid.

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I would just like to ask something about the influence of appearance of one person to another. In case for an instance, in a tournament and you don’t know anyone, how much of an influence does another player’s appearance have on your perception, particularly on how he will play on table?

Similarly, how will you see a person neatly dressed guy? Play tight? How about a “young punk”? Play loosely and smoothly?

Do you think appearance of players matters in the table?

I hope my question is also with sense. Thanks by the way for providing a great site!

Jason
Jason,

A player’s appearance will usually speak on how they play. This doesn’t always hold true, but it does speak to their personality. If you want to change your perceptions at the table, change how you dress. You will be surprised what people infer from your appearance alone.

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