Should Cash Game Players Play Tournaments?

Or are they just setting money on fire?

I’m a cash game no-limit hold ’em player and my advice addresses that type of poker only. Poker for profit doesn’t work for me in tournaments. Among other reasons, the variance is too high and thus it would require too large a bankroll for the return on investment to justify.

To be Frank, I would get too easily discouraged knowing I will lose the majority of times I sit down to play.

Still, there is some value to be had in playing tournaments, especially if you are a cash player who gets tired of the grind or if you looking to move up to live play.

Put the fun back into poker.

When I first tried short stacking using someone else’s default strategy, I made a little money, nothing life-changing, but it turned my win rate to the positive. That was great obviously, but I felt myself missing playing poker. Because by following that default strategy with no adjustments, I was definitely grinding poker.

If you learn my own default short stack strategy for 30BB it will be a little looser than that 20BB strategy I played. But it will be nothing like your beginning days of playing half your hands. Poker for profit requires discipline and patience, two things not normally associated with recreational activities.

Online micro-stakes tournaments can put the recreation back into poker. In cash games, rec players are your prey. In tournaments, you can enjoy being a rec player for a fraction of the cost of playing cash as a rec player. Tournaments, especially one-table sit-n-goes, go quickly and you will VPIP many more hands than your tight cash game strategy allows. If you have thirty or forty minutes to kill, relive your days as a fun player for a couple of dollars.

I love playing multi-table sit-n-goes at the micros. For a dollar and a nickle, you can buy into a three table, twenty-seven player tournament with a prize pool of twenty-seven dollars. You’re not in it for the money, but you will win sometimes and that keeps it fun. For that buck-oh-five you will often play for more than an hour, if you play your regular cash game tight aggressive strategy.

One table sit-and-go’s are the most fun. Some of them are “double up” or “triple up” tournaments. For double-ups, you buy in for $5.25 to play on a 6Max table and the last three players standing are paid off $10.00. For the triple up, you buy in for $3.30 and the last three standing are paid off $9.00 at the nine seat table.

Ok, but it’s even more fun to win. Can I beat those games?

If you would like to learn a bit about on-table tournament strategy so you that you win more often, I cannot think of a better place to start than this book:

I don’t know the author, no one paid me to endorse his book. In fact, I bought it for fifty cents at a local library when I was pleased to discover that someone had donated eight books about poker and the staff – not knowing what they had – just put them on the four bit shelf. Like any good poker book, this one lays out the strategy and provides hand examples.

Don’t get me wrong, this book will not turn you into a for-profit tournament player. Here at Keep Calm Re-Buy, we work with cash gamers who want to grind a steady profit. Making tournaments profitable is different in ways I hesitate to describe due to my relative ignorance of tournaments.

But it can help you last longer in tournaments and have wins more often.

Practice your live play cheaply.

The other benefit of playing tournaments is for the online cash game winner wanting to take a shot at live play is cheap practice. Online poker players are some of the best players in poker as many of the old school live players are learning the hard way. But sometimes, those of us who start out online can be intimidated by the idea of playing face-to-face with live humans.

There are many rules, written and unwritten for live play. I go over them in detail in Volume II of Keep Calm and Re-Buy. Online, the rules are enforced by the website’s algorithm, so you cannot break them and be penalized. Live, penalties for breaking rules can range from grumbling by your table-mates to having your hand declared dead in a pot you would have won.

Tournaments are an inexpensive way to get used to seeing and smelling live players, feeling real chips and being dealt cards made of paper and cellulose instead of digital cards. You will make mistakes with those cards, with your chips, with your hands, with your comments.

It is far better to make your live play beginner mistakes in twenty dollar tournaments than in cash games with two or three hundred dollar buy-ins. Some of the mistakes can cost you cash in a cash game, such as mucking your winning hand prematurely or check-raising the nuts on the river. It will be annoying if you do that in a tournament, but your losses will be limited to your buy-in which is often less than thirty dollars.

Once you start playing live and have been playing live for a while, at a room you are comfortable in, you may want to try other rooms as well. It will still be a good idea to familiarize yourself with a new card room by playing a couple of tournaments there. You can get used to the staff, and more importantly, start to gather information on the players.

Often players who manage to cash in a tournament will use their winnings to play in the cash games. A mistake such players often make is to play too loosely and aggressively when they first sit down. It may be because they look at the winnings as found money and fear risking it less than if it had come from their paycheck.

It may also be what I call the “exit ramp effect.” When I get off a freeway, I have to remind myself to slow down because I have spend several minutes driving at freeway speed. The same holds true for moving from a tournament to a cash table. I have to remind myself that the kind of hyper-aggressive push or fold strategy appropriate to the later blind levels of a tournament can be disastrous at a cash table.

Re-Buy Tournaments

Re-buy tournaments are the bane of cash game players who try their hands at tournaments.

In re-buy tournaments, you will encounter at least one, but usually several, players who specialize in going all-in with practically nothing, such as one medium or small pair or any two suited. They will go all-in and hope that you will call with ace-king or a big pair.

Why?

Because they are hoping for calls from stronger hands. Yes, because they hope a stronger hand will call and they will double up in a suck out. Their goal is to be doubled up before the first break or whatever the cutoff is for re-buys.

Players who are used to online tournaments with no rebuys are often frustrated when they play live against players like that. You felt a player who goes all-in with a barely playable hand and he just re-buys. Later, when he wins a pot you’re in, you think, ‘I already beat that guy!’

In a $25 buy-in tournament, I once had a guy jam all-in when I open-raised with pocket tens. I would hate to fold a hand like that anytime, but I had already seen this guy pull the same stunt several times and get folds, so I called my whole stack. This was maybe two orbits into the tournament, still the first level.

He turned over a hand that was two low, unconnected cards that were suited. He said, “good fold.” As you might guess, the runout gave him his flush. I went ahead and made the tilty decision to re-buy for twenty dollars. That was the first time I ever did that.

It was tilty, but I now believe that it was a good decision for this reason: say your plan is to take a shot at a regular $25 buy-in tournament at your local card house. You plan on $200 for eight buy-ins to see how you do. If you bust out early your first time, you have two options: walk away and come back the next time that runs, or re-buy on the spot.

If the entry is $25 and the rebuy is $20, your best option is to re-buy. You have already spent the time and gas getting to the card room, you’ve already gathered some information on the players and they have seen you go all-in with a hand that is just under premium so you have developed a somewhat loose table image.

Of course, the danger of that is that you would re-buy over and over when you are simply feeding chips to the other players at the table. So you would want to plan in advance to spend only a certain amount. You could decide to go in with $45 so that you can either bust out and re-buy once before break, or make it to break and top off for $20.

But wouldn’t that mean that your $200 shot bankroll will only let you play four tourneys?

Well . . . yes and no. You would only sit down in four tournament events, but I prefer to regard re-buying into a tournament as starting a new tournament, just like when I keep calm and rebuy in a cash game. That way, you still get your eight tournaments for $200, with $20 left over. Ad an extra $5 and you get nine tournaments for $205.

Either way, the math is the same. You look for a return on your investment of $200 that give you a bankroll of more than $200. So you need to place in the money for one tourney for at least $201, or in two for an average of $51 each and so forth.

Plus, by not playing so nitty, you may go all-in against a hyper-aggressive early level player and double or triple up.

What little I know about tournament strategy

The reason there is a push-fold mentality at a tournament table is that the blinds start out relatively low and increase quickly from level to level. For example, in a nine-player sit-n-go online, the starting stack might be 1,500 chips with blinds of 10/20. So the starting stack is seventy-five big blinds, an awkward size for a cash game.

Within minutes the blinds go up to 20/40. Now your original stack size is 37.5BB. Perhaps you have doubled up or perhaps you have lost half. If you have lost a chunk while the blinds are going up, you are in a position in which the only way to stay in the tournament is to double up, probably more than once. Playing tightly will only force you to watch your stack drained by the ever-increasing blinds.

Hence the push-fold mentality.

“Turbo” tournaments may start with 500 chips and players are only allowed thirty seconds to make decisions. This speeds up play to a hellish pace that can be exciting though not especially profitable unless you know how to play and win.

The math of tournaments

If you pay ten dollars and fifty cents for a 1,500 starting stack, the fifty cents is taken off the top as the website’s profit. So you 1,500 stack is worth ten dollars, and each chip is worth .006666 of a dollar or just under .7 of a ¢. So your 10/20 blinds are worth ~ 6.7¢/13.4¢.

In theory.

That seven to thirteen cent value is not based on the amount you paid into the prize pool, but the size of the prize pool itself. Multiply that .0066666 of a dollar by the size of each player’s stack times the number of each players and you will get the same number as the entire prize pool.

Your equity is your 1/9 share of the $90 prize pool.

But that only applies to the very first hand you play by VPIP or paying the blinds. After that, you have more or fewer chips. Your equity in the prize pool grows or shrinks accordingly.

The main mathematical theory of tournament poker is called ICM – the Independent Chip Model. ICM converts your stack into its equity in the final prize pool and takes note of the difference in the value of each chip in your stack compared to the value – to you – of chips you might win.

In cash games risk vs. reward is relatively easy to calculate. Under ICM theory, the chips in your hand are worth more than the chips you can win by risking them. So a pot-sized bet by Villain gives you 2:1 pot odds in chips but not exactly a risk vs reward ratio of 2:1. The reward will be somewhat less or much less depending on exactly where you are in the tournament compared to your opponents and to the current size of the blinds.

That is the tip of the tip of the iceberg for tournament strategy, which is in addition to all the other poker knowledge about hand equity, combos, etc. It tires me out just to think of learning all of it, which is why I stick to cash games. I am a middle school math teacher, not an advanced calculus professor.

The book above is about one-table sit-n-goes in which the prizes go to the top three or four players and in which the first place wins significantly more than the player who barely finishes in the money. I believe that if you read it and apply what it teaches you can be a break-even to slight winner at micro-stakes and small-stakes tournaments. I am not sure you could beat the “rake” enough to be a significant winner.

But that is from a person who is not expert in tournaments

I think that if any type of sit-n-go could be consistently beatable, without extensive knowledge of tournament math, it would be the double up or triple up games in which the prize is evenly split among the top half or top third of players. I find very little in the poker literature about them, and they seem very popular based on how quickly they fill.

I am currently working on a default strategy for double ups that I will test using the ten buy-in challenge method. After that, I’ll do the same with triple ups.

Stay tuned for the results!

Photo by Jp Valery on Unsplash

Frank Reese is a public school math teacher with a Masters degree in psychology. In poker he has found a way to combine math and psychology for fun and profit.