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Poker Tournaments:
Making money
Even after years, the big majority of regular poker players never seem to come
to grips with exactly what the heck they are doing -- or, more precisely, what
they are trying to do. Today let's just focus on poker for money. Forget
anything having to do with relaxation, the challenge or fun. Just consider poker
playing and the making of (or losing of) money.
Middle-limit ring game players are notorious for crying like two year olds
whenever time collection charges are due. There are lots of anecdotal stories
about high limit players who shriek at dealers or waitresses who assume a dollar
chip was meant as a tip. But at the same time, very few players seem to
understand that they win (or lose) money just like a worker punching a time
clock. You put in the hours, and you make or lose your expectation. You apply
and re-apply your advantages endlessly, and you accumulate dribbles and droplets
of profit from everything you do in, around, and in preparation for poker games.
But that just sounds like hooey to most players. All they see is pots... big
pots, small pots... big winning days, crappy losing days. They fall into the
trap of thinking money is made in lumps. They think it springs full-grown from
Zeus' forehead. But that is not how it works. Money is made by planting seeds,
nursing seedlings, and cultivating the resultant crops.
All winning poker is simply a matter of putting in the hours when you have the
best of it. Hopelessly un-sexy, but there it is.
Poker tournaments are no different, even though the wrong thinking of most
players is at its peak when thinking of tournaments.
Because they have a relatively low rake, and because skill is more highly
valued, tournaments will always be extremely profitable and a good use of time
for top players. But tournaments simply do not run round the clock -- major
brick & mortar ones anyway. You simply cannot put in all that many hours in a
year playing major tournament poker. And if you do put in a lot of time, you
have to travel all over the planet, with the resulting high expenses. Low rake
and high skill make tournaments more profitable than parallel ring games for
skilled players, but travel costs raise the effective rake of being a tournament
player. Think of the edge you would need to have to fly from San Jose to Las
Vegas for one $1000 tournament. Parking, airfare, cab fare, hotel,
restaurants... this all is de facto tournament rake. Of course, most players
travel for a block of days, but still the concept is the same. Overhead is a
different kind of rake. (Obviously the same idea is true for traveling ring game
players.)
Skilled players must pay rake to Southwest Airlines and Hilton Hotels. This
takes a lot of poker money out of circulation too. As do satellites, an
ingenious way for casinos to essentially charge rake on the same money twice.
Tournaments by their nature bleed off money that ends up in the pockets of
non-poker players.
But that doesn't alter the fundamental profitability of the tournament format
for winning players. It just means that players need to understand that their
time is money, and that all their expenses are rake. A large number of players
will never be suited for tournaments simply because they can't get their brain
around the concept of not winning for months at a time, and then reaping a big
windfall. That windfall is simply payment for all the hours put in while not
winning. All those hours were compensated at the same rate (assuming the player
always played roughly at the same quality level). Winning isn't a big score,
and, big news flash, you should not spend money like a sailor when it happens.
That win is merely a lump sum payment for the hours you ground out over many
days, weeks or months. All your expenses must be factored against that win, and
the time commitment it took.
Both the tournament and ring game poker worlds are riddled with talented but
busted deadbeats who don't understand that poker is a lifetime game of milking
small edges.
Winning poker is a methodical process of cause and effect, of seeds and crops.
Suckers think of tournaments in terms of "the big score". Don't fall into the
trap. Tournaments are hourly wage labor, where your own skills and your own
ongoing frugality determine the wage.
One difference between ring game
poker and tournament poker is that tournaments are a single unit unto
themselves. In ring games, we should play hands in a holistic fashion -- if you
do something on the flop, you should be prepared for the various possible
consequences of that action on the turn and river. The nature of ring games is
each hand is basically a unit unto itself. You (or your opponents) can even quit
after any hand. In contrast, the repercussions of tournament action extend much
more beyond individual hands. While the basic unit of ring games is the hand,
the basic unit of a tournament is the tournament itself.
Recently I was watching the end of an online No Limit tournament. Mary had John
four to one in chips, and John was playing in a very predictable way. This was
bad, but Mary's reaction was almost as bad. She played each hand against John as
individual units. In ring games, hands matter. In tournaments, especially No
Limit, hands are nothing at all. Mary could lose ten hands in a row, and win the
tournament on the eleventh! Since John was playing so predictable, Mary's game
should have been focusing on waiting for the best situations to exploit his
predictability.
Suppose every time John was on the
button, he raised all-in. And then suppose that when he was in the big blind he
would never play any hand for a raise except AA. Okay, this is so predictable in
the extreme, but notice that some things become plainly obvious. First, Mary
should raise the minimum every hand on the button, regardless of what she has.
If John reraises her, that means he has AA and she gets away with a minimum
loss. Every other time she would win the blinds. Mary should be looking to play
for all John's chips whenever she picks up one of the top half dozen or so hands
in her big blind. AA, KK, QQ, JJ, AK, AQ... eventually she would get one of
these hands, and then she should take on John's all-in raise as a big favorite
over a random hand.
What she should not do is call one of his raises with 22 or JT. What she should
not do is think "John is stealing my blind without looking at his cards." That
particular fact doesn't matter. He is ALWAYS stealing. There is more going on
than this one hand. We don't care about that blind, or who wins this hand. We
only care about the tournament as a whole.
Unfortunately for most players, they don't see that there is a bigger picture in
tournament situations, partly because the bigger picture doesn't really exist in
ring games. In ring games you should set up future opportunities, but every ring
game hand that you play has a value of its own. Hard currency is exchanged. In
tournaments you want to win the LAST hand, and basically couldn't care less
about any hand before that.
If you have a head-up opponent playing predictably against you, then you must
remember that at all times, not notice it each time it happens! If every time
you check your opponent then bets all-in, you should happily check and let him
win hand after hand. When you beat him, you win the tournament. You win
everything at stake. Those ten pots he won had no actual value at all, because
of his predictable play. YOU actually got the value, because his play was
predictably exploitable.
The practical application of this is not so easy, but it is something that
should be going through your mind at the end of a tournament. The important
thing is not that you face a turn bet of $XXXX when you hold JT and the board is
KT62. Oftentimes your mind should be focusing on a hand that will be played
three or five or ten hands from now. Do not do what maximizes your potential in
this hand. Do the action that maximizes your potential in the tournament.
Winning hands is not your goal. Winning tournaments is.
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