TV, Tournaments, strategic thinking
Influence of TV
I wrote my first poker book in 1999 (it was published in 2001), long before the huge growth in poker triggered by television coverage of no limit Hold’Em poker tournaments. When I wrote my first book limit hold’em was the primary game, no limit games where very rare in cardrooms. So I didn’t devote a lot of space to no limit hold’em in that book. Most of the TV coverage has been of no limit hold’em tournaments, which has created a lot of interest in no limit hold’em among new players.
Limit games are still common, but small blind no limit games have become the predominant game being spread in many cardrooms these days and interest in the games is growing. A $50 or $100 buy in no limit game isn’t really all that hard to find. Three years ago it was almost impossible to find such a game in a cardroom.
It’s not just the TV coverage that’s spawned the growth in popularity of no limit hold’em – the internet has had a lot of influence also. The economics of an internet poker room allows them to spread penny-ante games. The marginal cost of them opening an extra game is essentially zero so they can profitably spread games that only rake pennies per hour – providing players an introduction to no limit hold’em that only requires them to put one or two dollars at risk.
Of course online poker rooms do face other costs, the risk of being faced with criminal sanctions from the US government is very real and unpredictable.
Of course TV coverage and the availability of internet games haven’t operated on the poker boom independently. The boom in both internet games and TV coverage was fueled by Chris Moneymaker’s win of the World Series of Poker (WSOP) in 2003. Interest skyrocketed when the internet laying accountant from Tennessee became an instant millionaire from winning the WSOP. Moneymaker had the effect of creating a bridge between the internet and TV as far as poker is concerned.
Tournament Strategy
Most of the TV coverage is of the final table of a large, multi-table event, the last 9 or 10 players of hundreds or thousands of players who started in the event. In the final stages of the event a poker tournament plays differently than a regular poker game. There are fundamental strategic differe3nces between tournament play and the play of regular poker games. Play is faster paced and more aggressive. There are at least four reasons for this: a structured payout schedule, limitations on time, a limit on total chips in play, and player fatigue.
The most important strategic reason tournaments are different from regular games is that tournaments don’t pay winner take all. When you buy in to a tournament you pay full value for your chips (there are some exceptions in re-buy events that I’ll get to later). But when you win a tournament you only get something like 30-50% of the original purchase value, usually towards the low end of that range. That’s because some of the money was paired out to losing players 2nd place got some, 3rd place got some, etc. You have to win all the chips to get 30% of the money. That mismatch in chips values makes for strategic differences between final table play in a large tournament and play in a regular game where you cash in any chips you win at face value and you can do so at any time. I’ll be pointing out some of the details of these strategic differences throughout the book.
Another factor that affects strategic play is time. Theoretically a cash game can last forever. Players leave, and new players sit down. After 24 hours it probably won’t be the same players, but the game can still be going. Tournaments don’t have new players arriving. And the old players can’t leave until they either go busted or win. So there has to be a device to ensure the end of a tournament. You could just have a tournament finish after a fixed amount of time, but tradition has settled on playing until one player has all the chips (even though he doesn’t get all the money).
But if you have two players who are fairly evenly matched, both with a log of chips, it’s entirely possible that they could play for a lifetime, just trading a few chips back and forth. That wouldn’t be a good result.
To ensure that the game eventually terminates, tournaments are played with escalating blinds and antes. The blinds are forced bets that are required every hand. Money will get put in the pot whether there’s any players who want to play that hand or not, and somebody will always win something, insuring that chips get transferred among the players. The blinds just get bigger and bigger even though the total number of chips in play stay the same. This escalation of the ratio of blinds to chips puts pressure on all the players to get in and mix it up. You can play a sit and wait game for awhile. But you’ll eventually reach a point where you simply can’t do that anymore, when you’ll have to take a stand or go broke posting bigger and bigger blinds while you’re waiting.
This brings us to a limitation on chips in play and the subsequent limitation on stack sizes, the third factor that often drives strategy in tournaments. Stack size, how many chips you have relative to the other players and to the blinds, makes a difference in how you should play in various situations. Stack size situations aren’t unique to tournaments, they also arise in regular games, but such situations occur more frequently in tournaments because the playing structure calls for regular increases in blind sizes and you can’t add chips to your stack during the tournament (at least in the late stages).
You probably can’t bluff a player who only has one chip left. So, the stack sizes of you and your opponents can have a major strategic influence. Stack size mismatches can occur in either tournaments or regular games. But since players can just keep buying chips in cash games, stack size mismatches don’t occur automatically.
Since you can control your own stack size in regular games, the mismatches of primary interest in cash games are from the point of view of playing against short stacks or extremely large stacks. There’s no reason for you to ever play in a cash game with a short stack because it puts you at a distinct disadvantage and you always have the option of cashing out and coming back another day. But in tournaments you don’t want to give up just because you lost most of you chips, so playing a short stack is an important tournament skill, while playing against a short stack is an important skill in both tournaments and cash games.
The ultimate short stack story is the chip and a chair story of Jack Strauss. The year he won the WSOP he was all in at one point and lost that pot. Then he discovered a single $500 chip that had been covered by a napkin and into included in his bet. It turned out that he’d only thought he was all in. The ruling was that the chip played, he was still in the game. He parlayed that one chip into a first place finish.
The fourth reason is one that isn’t often discussed. People get tired. In cash games you should never play tired. Period. Go home. Take a nap. There will be another game tomorrow.
Even if everyone at the table is equally fatigued, any edge you might have had at the beginning is probably gone. Fatigue is a great equalizer. But in tournaments you sometimes have no choice but to remain at the table while battling fatigue. The ability to maintain mental alertness and avoiding fatigue is a much more important factor in tournaments than it is in cash games. You can avoid marathon cash games (and I recommend you do so). You can’t win a moderate sized tournament without finishing a marathon.
The payout schedule, the ratio of blinds to your stack, and the ratio of your stack to that of other players can all have a strong effect on strategic decisions. The only one of these situations that’s totally unique to tournaments is the payout schedule. You should never play short stacked in cash games. You should just quit if you get short-stacked and don’t have money to add to your stack. But even if you don’t get short-stacked yourself, you will encounter other players who get short-stacked. From a strategic point of view, knowing how your opponents will likely be playing is one of the most important inputs into your decision making process, if not the most important. So, knowing how an opponent with a short stack will likely respond is important even if you’ll never be short-stacked yourself.
I wrote my first poker book in 1999 (it was published in 2001), long before the huge growth in poker triggered by television coverage of no limit Hold’Em poker tournaments. When I wrote my first book limit hold’em was the primary game, no limit games where very rare in cardrooms. So I didn’t devote a lot of space to no limit hold’em in that book. Most of the TV coverage has been of no limit hold’em tournaments, which has created a lot of interest in no limit hold’em among new players.
Limit games are still common, but small blind no limit games have become the predominant game being spread in many cardrooms these days and interest in the games is growing. A $50 or $100 buy in no limit game isn’t really all that hard to find. Three years ago it was almost impossible to find such a game in a cardroom.
It’s not just the TV coverage that’s spawned the growth in popularity of no limit hold’em – the internet has had a lot of influence also. The economics of an internet poker room allows them to spread penny-ante games. The marginal cost of them opening an extra game is essentially zero so they can profitably spread games that only rake pennies per hour – providing players an introduction to no limit hold’em that only requires them to put one or two dollars at risk.
Of course online poker rooms do face other costs, the risk of being faced with criminal sanctions from the US government is very real and unpredictable.
Of course TV coverage and the availability of internet games haven’t operated on the poker boom independently. The boom in both internet games and TV coverage was fueled by Chris Moneymaker’s win of the World Series of Poker (WSOP) in 2003. Interest skyrocketed when the internet laying accountant from Tennessee became an instant millionaire from winning the WSOP. Moneymaker had the effect of creating a bridge between the internet and TV as far as poker is concerned.
Tournament Strategy
Most of the TV coverage is of the final table of a large, multi-table event, the last 9 or 10 players of hundreds or thousands of players who started in the event. In the final stages of the event a poker tournament plays differently than a regular poker game. There are fundamental strategic differe3nces between tournament play and the play of regular poker games. Play is faster paced and more aggressive. There are at least four reasons for this: a structured payout schedule, limitations on time, a limit on total chips in play, and player fatigue.
The most important strategic reason tournaments are different from regular games is that tournaments don’t pay winner take all. When you buy in to a tournament you pay full value for your chips (there are some exceptions in re-buy events that I’ll get to later). But when you win a tournament you only get something like 30-50% of the original purchase value, usually towards the low end of that range. That’s because some of the money was paired out to losing players 2nd place got some, 3rd place got some, etc. You have to win all the chips to get 30% of the money. That mismatch in chips values makes for strategic differences between final table play in a large tournament and play in a regular game where you cash in any chips you win at face value and you can do so at any time. I’ll be pointing out some of the details of these strategic differences throughout the book.
Another factor that affects strategic play is time. Theoretically a cash game can last forever. Players leave, and new players sit down. After 24 hours it probably won’t be the same players, but the game can still be going. Tournaments don’t have new players arriving. And the old players can’t leave until they either go busted or win. So there has to be a device to ensure the end of a tournament. You could just have a tournament finish after a fixed amount of time, but tradition has settled on playing until one player has all the chips (even though he doesn’t get all the money).
But if you have two players who are fairly evenly matched, both with a log of chips, it’s entirely possible that they could play for a lifetime, just trading a few chips back and forth. That wouldn’t be a good result.
To ensure that the game eventually terminates, tournaments are played with escalating blinds and antes. The blinds are forced bets that are required every hand. Money will get put in the pot whether there’s any players who want to play that hand or not, and somebody will always win something, insuring that chips get transferred among the players. The blinds just get bigger and bigger even though the total number of chips in play stay the same. This escalation of the ratio of blinds to chips puts pressure on all the players to get in and mix it up. You can play a sit and wait game for awhile. But you’ll eventually reach a point where you simply can’t do that anymore, when you’ll have to take a stand or go broke posting bigger and bigger blinds while you’re waiting.
This brings us to a limitation on chips in play and the subsequent limitation on stack sizes, the third factor that often drives strategy in tournaments. Stack size, how many chips you have relative to the other players and to the blinds, makes a difference in how you should play in various situations. Stack size situations aren’t unique to tournaments, they also arise in regular games, but such situations occur more frequently in tournaments because the playing structure calls for regular increases in blind sizes and you can’t add chips to your stack during the tournament (at least in the late stages).
You probably can’t bluff a player who only has one chip left. So, the stack sizes of you and your opponents can have a major strategic influence. Stack size mismatches can occur in either tournaments or regular games. But since players can just keep buying chips in cash games, stack size mismatches don’t occur automatically.
Since you can control your own stack size in regular games, the mismatches of primary interest in cash games are from the point of view of playing against short stacks or extremely large stacks. There’s no reason for you to ever play in a cash game with a short stack because it puts you at a distinct disadvantage and you always have the option of cashing out and coming back another day. But in tournaments you don’t want to give up just because you lost most of you chips, so playing a short stack is an important tournament skill, while playing against a short stack is an important skill in both tournaments and cash games.
The ultimate short stack story is the chip and a chair story of Jack Strauss. The year he won the WSOP he was all in at one point and lost that pot. Then he discovered a single $500 chip that had been covered by a napkin and into included in his bet. It turned out that he’d only thought he was all in. The ruling was that the chip played, he was still in the game. He parlayed that one chip into a first place finish.
The fourth reason is one that isn’t often discussed. People get tired. In cash games you should never play tired. Period. Go home. Take a nap. There will be another game tomorrow.
Even if everyone at the table is equally fatigued, any edge you might have had at the beginning is probably gone. Fatigue is a great equalizer. But in tournaments you sometimes have no choice but to remain at the table while battling fatigue. The ability to maintain mental alertness and avoiding fatigue is a much more important factor in tournaments than it is in cash games. You can avoid marathon cash games (and I recommend you do so). You can’t win a moderate sized tournament without finishing a marathon.
The payout schedule, the ratio of blinds to your stack, and the ratio of your stack to that of other players can all have a strong effect on strategic decisions. The only one of these situations that’s totally unique to tournaments is the payout schedule. You should never play short stacked in cash games. You should just quit if you get short-stacked and don’t have money to add to your stack. But even if you don’t get short-stacked yourself, you will encounter other players who get short-stacked. From a strategic point of view, knowing how your opponents will likely be playing is one of the most important inputs into your decision making process, if not the most important. So, knowing how an opponent with a short stack will likely respond is important even if you’ll never be short-stacked yourself.
posted by Gary Carson at 2:15 PM
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