Strategy Adjustments from Cash Games to Poker Tournaments

In years past, a poker tournament was a rare occurrence. Today, poker tournaments are the norm. The new generation of poker enthusiasts learned about the game by watching Texas hold’em tournaments on television. At any online poker site, you can play a tournament at any time, be it a single table sit and go or a large multi-table affair. You may have seen some professional players described as “cash game specialists” as opposed to “tournament pros.” Is there really a difference? While some players are proficient at both tournament and cash game play, there is definitely a difference. If you’re moving from cash game play to tournament action, you’ll have to make some key adjustments.

There are three factors that make tournament poker significantly different from cash poker and that require adjustment by the player. They are raising blinds, the threat of elimination and payout structure.

Rising Blinds

If you’ve watched tournaments on television, you may have heard the commentator refer to a short stack who is playing too tight by saying, “He can’t afford to wait around for pocket aces.” In a cash game, you can afford to wait around for pocket aces, or at least, a very strong premium hand. If the blinds are a relatively small percentage of your stack, which they often are in cash games, you can afford to see many hands before the blinds do any real damage. On the other hand, in a tournament, the blinds continually go up, which means you’re a shark: Keep moving forward or die. You’ve got to find ways to collect chips in a tournament, and the higher the blinds are relative to your stack, the looser you need to be in your hand requirements.

The Threat of Elimination

In a cash game, when you put someone all-in, it’s usually pure math that determines whether your opponent will call. If he thinks he’s getting even a slight edge, it’s correct to call, since if he loses he can rebuy and try to get into the same situation again. In a tournament, if you lose your stack, you’re finished, so getting all your chips in with only a slight edge is not recommended. This also means that big stacks can, and should, bully smaller stacks, since the small stack can be eliminated, but the big stack cannot.

Payout Structure

Unlike in a cash game where you can pick up your winnings at any time and leave, you only get paid in a tournament if you finish in the top 10 percent, and in freerolls, sometimes only a couple of percent gets paid. This means that when there are only a few players left until the money (“the bubble”), you may have to make a strategy adjustment, folding even premium hands if you are a medium stack when there are a lot of small stacks who can get eaten up by the blinds allowing you to coast into the money, and stepping up the aggression if you are a big stack, since you can steal lots of pots from players who don’t want to get knocked out on the bubble. Of course, you can decide on a different strategy. You may want to get aggressive with a middle stack, preferring to give yourself a chance to win rather than settling for a small payout, or you may want to sit on your big stack and coast to the money. Either way, you will have to consider payout position when determining your actions.

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