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Mr. Strangepoker, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Tournaments

I didn’t always love tournaments. In fact I used to think they were a frivolous waste of two valuable poker resources: time and money. Specifically my time and my money! To me tournaments were strange poker. Let me explain.

As some of you already know, I began playing serious poker because I had to pay bills. At the time I really needed the money. Money earned at the poker table was money I used to build my bankroll and pay for life’s little luxuries like rent and utilities. Therefore my decision to play in tournaments was not a frivolous one. Every minute I spent away from the cash games meant loss of earnings. I was grinding it out at the lower limits and I had to make sure I had a good reason for playing tournaments.

The upside was obvious: If I won, or finished in the top three, the return on investment (my entry fee plus any re-buys or top-ups) was terrific; more than I could hope to win in many sessions of cash play at the stakes I was bankrolled for. The downsides were many though: If I did not finish in the top three then usually it seemed like wasted time and money. I wasted my entry fee and lost valuable opportunities for earning in the cash games and worse, I drained my bankroll. At an earning rate of $12–15 per hour playing cash, losing a $100 or $200 buy-in was not a disaster, but it was a setback. It took ten to twenty hours of play just to get back to where I was before I bought in for the tournament.

These mental machinations meant that it was a long time before I entered a tournament. Due to boredom and the lack of a seat in a cash game (there was a waiting list and players busting out of the tournament always got first dibs) at my New York semi-legal poker club, I decided to pay the sixty-dollar entry fee. It was a re-buy tournament. I never had to re-buy and since I had a better-than-average stack at the break, I was too cheap to top-up. By a combination of luck and good cards I managed to finish third. In fact I could have finished in first place but when it was three handed, I went all-in with AK against the big stack who called with pocket nines and made a set of nines on the Flop.

I was a pretty solid low-limit cash game player at this point but I knew very little about no-limit Hold’em and less about tournament strategy. I had played very cautiously, got lucky at the right times, and after playing very few hands had somehow managed to finish in the money. Third place was a little over $700 as I recall. Not a fortune, but a pretty good haul for a low-limit cash player to make in about four hours of play.

Now I began to wonder, was there something to tournament play or were tournament players merely playthings in the palms of the poker gods? Okay, I didn’t think that. What I thought was, is it possible to play tournaments profitably? Could I play in such a way as to make consistent profits as I had learned to do in cash games?

For a long time I firmly believed that the answer was no. Poker has a high element of luck at the best of times when played for cash. Even skillful players I observed sometimes had long runs of bad luck and bad beats. Tournament play seemed even worse. Sometimes idiots seemed to walk away winners and the good players usually wasted hours for no return. I loved it when the latest tournament winner, flush with success, would join the cash game I was in and give up large chunks of those winnings. I liked tournaments for this reason alone!

So I sat behind my closed-mindedness, content to believe that tournaments were for lucky idiots and gamblers and helped ensure that the lucky had some money to lose in cash games. I was not a sucker, I reasoned; I would not play tournaments, and when I did it was a weakness of mind, namely, I wanted to experience the thrill of no-limit Hold’em and get my shot at the big-game players without having to have a big bankroll. It appeased my ego. Bad grinder, bad grinder, get down from that tournament table.

Closed-mindedness has a problem though: Facts have a way of making it really uncomfortable. That is, if you are willing to acknowledge them. There was one fact I could not ignore: Some players seemed to consistently finish in the money. Not every time, but far more than pure luck would allow. Of course, I had a rational and carefully reasoned mathematical explanation for this: They were very lucky SOBs! They seemed to violate many of the rules of good cash game play and still do okay. Sometimes they would bust out early, other times they made a mountain of chips and dominated the other players. When I did run against these types in tournaments I hated it. My regular, somewhat conservative cash game seemed to be insufficient to get the job done. I often got to (or close to) final tables but I usually had a stack too small to be playable. I just figured I was an unlucky bugger and that the poker gods were punishing me for playing tournaments and guiding me back to cash.

But I could not ignore facts. I had to admit that these players were doing something differently and that is why they were getting exceptional results. I could not see what the difference was exactly, it was not obvious. I was suffering from poker myopia, actually poker cataracts. What was blinding me? Answer: Conventional poker theory!

It took me a long time to figure this out. You see, I was a good student. I read and studied the poker Olympians of theory. To this day I still believe David Sklansky and Mason Malmuth sit at the top of the Stratosphere in Las Vegas (dressed in togas), dispense poker wisdom, and laugh at the foolishness of mere poker mortals like you and me. The problem was the Olympians and their acolytes had surprisingly little to say about tournaments. There was Gap Theory, Expected Value, Chip Value and extensive discussion about the various stages of tournament play. Despite these erudite writings, I was not satisfied that the Olympians knew everything they claimed to know about the best way to play tournament poker. The problem was those blasted facts again. The Olympians did not seem to do so well in tournaments or never entered any that I could see (why should they, when they were winning in cash games), and many successful tournament players seemed to flout the dictates of the Olympians yet they kept on winning.

Could it be that the Olympians had some gaps in their theories? Sorry, bad pun. Maybe, but I felt like a heretic for even thinking such dark thoughts. Any moment the poker thought police could accost me at the table and, like the furies, drive me from it. Okay, I’m getting a bit carried away. Maybe I realized that sometimes you have to think for yourself a bit and trust in your own observations, not just others’ opinions, however erudite they seem.

Slowly, the veil began to lift and I realized that to be a successful player in fast (one day or less) multi-table poker tournaments, one needed skills and a mind-set quite different from the one possessed by even very good and successful cash players. I knew that cash and tournaments were different but I did not realize how to translate this into a practical playing method.

The following chapters will reveal these methods and I will illustrate them in the format of hand problems as I did in Limit Hold’em Hand by Hand and No-Limit Hold’em Hand by Hand. If you study what is to follow and practice these methods, I guarantee that you will enjoy a significant advantage over the average player in fast-structure (I’ll tell you what I mean by this later) no-limit Hold’em tournaments, the most commonly played and easily findable tournaments of today. You will know what it takes to win and you will enjoy more top place finishes than ever before. To the players who read, study, absorb, and practice these methods, you will just be another one of those lucky SOBs whom the poker gods seem to favor. I hope you can stand the success. So jump in and let’s have some fun.