“Tournament poker isn’t real poker…”
It looks a lot like it but its not the same thing.” I wish I could remember which pro said this. I think it was either Barry or Doyle, but it has been a few years. At the time I really didn’t understand. Everyone I knew had caught the poker bug from watching the WPT or WSOP and all they wanted to do was play tournaments. The first time I ever played Texas Hold’em was a tournament in my brother-in-law’s garage (which I managed to bubble after playing for seven hours.) When I started playing online I spent about 90% of my time playing tournaments and SnG’s and when I did play cash games it was PLO8 because the play was so weak it was like printing money. How could anybody say that a tournament isn’t real poker? Of course it is real poker, right?
Well, a funny thing happened on the way to the table. Over the last couple of years it has become harder and harder for me to block out enough time to play a tournament. It seemed like if I wanted to play a tournament I had two choices, ignore my wife and son for four to six hours on a Saturday or Sunday, or wait for them to go to bed and stay up all night if I managed to go deep and feel like crap the next day from sleep deprivation. In that time I also bought a wireless card for my laptop so I could connect to the Internet using the cellular phone network while I am out here on the road. It is pretty cool, but there are a few minor problems with it. It can be brutally slow at times, it also has a tendency to disconnect if the signal gets weak. Anyone who has ever been disconnected during a tourney knows how bad this can be, especially late when the blinds get high and the chip leader has an M of about 8. I also decided I wanted to become the best player I could be, and everything I had read and heard said it was much easier for a good cash game player to become a good tournament player than the other way around. It was time for a change.
All of these things just seemed to push me until I ended up at the cash tables. I have now played thousands and thousands of cash hands now and I am so glad I made the change. The time flexibility was really what I needed. I can play whenever I find the time, and if my family needs me for something they only have to wait for the big blind to come back around to me. I can pick up and go while I am out here on the road which lets me play a lot more. Disconnections aren’t as big of a deal now so the most I can lose is whatever I have in the pot when I cut out. It has really let me play a lot more poker than before and I think I am a much better player than I would have been if I had stuck with tournaments.
I now also have to agree with the quote that I started this post with, tournament poker isn’t real poker…It looks a lot like it but its not the same thing. I still play the occasional tourney every now and then, but it seems like after an hour or so I am questioning why I even decided to play. After playing deep-stacked cash games for so long now tournament poker just seems very limited to me. It almost feels like when you get a trial version of a software program. Want to print your document? You gotta pay for the full version. Want to play a turn and a river? You gotta play a cash game. It just seems like everything is push push push. There just isn’t room to be creative. I like to make plays, leverage my position and float people’s continuation bets and take pots away on the turn when they give up. I want to be able to represent a hand that I don’t have and be able to fold when it doesn’t work. And above all else, I want to be able to take that two-outer in stride and click the little dealer box and buy back in for 100 blinds. You just can’t do that in a tourney.
I’ll give you one hand to illustrate my frustration. Last week I was playing the AIPS tourney and it was right around time for the first break. The blinds are 50-100 and I have a 3000 chip stack, so I am doing OK. A player with 2500 chips raises to 300 from middle position and I am in the hijack seat with pocket Queens. I make a re-raise to 900 and it folds back around to the original raiser who just calls. I really wasn’t expecting that, I figured it was push or fold but whatever he wants to do is fine with me. The flop is a nine-high rainbow and my opponent checks to me. The pot is almost 2000 chips which is bigger more than either of us have left in our stacks so I move all-in. My opponent folds and I pick up a nice pot.
So what is the problem? I had no choice but to push. Any bet I made would have committed my opponent here so I applied maximum pressure. If this were a cash game and we were 100 blinds deep I could have done a lot of things. I could bet half pot here and try to get some value. I could check behind to induce a worse hand to bet into me on the turn. If I bet and he check-raises me I can get away from the hand. After all of these we get to play the turn and the river too, which makes it infinitely more interesting. Too often in a tournament the turn and river (and even the flop) are not really played, they are simply there to see who gets lucky and who goes home.
In the end, I think it all boils down to this- tournament poker has less decisions to make than cash poker, and with all the resources available to players they are getting better at making them correctly. When everyone is playing well, the skill is somewhat negated and the luck factor goes up. The more streets that are actually played, the more skill is required and the chance that someone will make a mistake also goes up.
Maybe I should try the rebuy tournaments if I am going to play. The stacks are much deeper early on and the game actually plays more like real poker than a regular tournament, at least after the rebuy period is over. The bad beats still suck though because you can’t reach into your pocket for more chips. I don’t know, sometimes I wonder why I want to play this game that looks like poker when I know it isn’t really poker after all.
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I understand where you are coming from.. I definitely do. I had some similar frustrations with a tournament I played last Sunday after I had been playing a lot cash game hours.. It certainly doesn’t help when the blinds and antes are going up and putting the pressure on. It makes it even harder to play real poker. The big stacks are taking advantage of this and making the smaller stacks gamble and playing poker -for real- is no longer an option. And of course.. nothing is worse than playing for hours and hours for just to not cash at the end of the day. So why do we play them at all?
Tournaments have their own brand of strategy.. the best books I’ve read on it that have helped my game are Harrington on Hold ‘Em Vol I & II. I’m currently working on improving my middle game so I don’t find myself in tough situations on the bubble… haha like on Sunday..
I like tournaments because I like that there is a winner when it’s all said and done. It’s exciting when we’re getting down to the money or in the money and people start to go out and your payday increases…
I agree, though, working on your cash game first will improve your tournament play. It will help you become more creative in certain situations.. let alone just seeing more hands in the long run. However, the mentality and strategy has to be treated differently. I don’t like rebuys.. as a personal preference… and I also don’t like to play tournaments with short starting stacks.. I tend to win or place well in deep stack tournaments that I’ve played… so I try to stick with that..
We’ll see though.. I’m playing in a ladies tourney (even though I said I was done with the ladies) at the Bike on Sunday….