Tournament Hold 'em Hand By Hand:. Neil D. Myers
Tournament Hold’em Hand by Hand
The Step-by-Step Guide to the Final Table
NEIL D. MYERS
This volume is dedicated to my son,
Benjamin Myers, and also to all of the
world’s unconventional thinkers. As far
as I can see, real progress in any field is
made by those who are willing to think
outside the “box,” challenge accepted
views, and take on orthodoxy. In my life, I
have been lucky enough to meet and get to
know many such people and they have
changed my world for the better. If this
book encourages you to at least examine
some of your poker assumptions and see if
they are indeed valid, then I feel I have
done my job as an author. If my son,
Benjamin, is willing to think for himself
as he grows up, and not blindly follow
conventional wisdom, even that offered by
his dad, then perhaps I have done some of
my job as a father.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Part One: Basics
Introduction: Mr. Strangepoker, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Tournaments
1. Who This Book Is For and What You Will Learn from It
2. How to Use This Book, plus the Ideal Tournament and the General Winning Method
3. A Book You Must Read
4. Seven Reasons to Play No-Limit Hold’em Tournaments
Part Two: Mindset and Key Skills
5. Cash Games vs. Tournaments
6. Survival or Chip Accumulation
7. Bluffing and Tells
Part Three: Position and Stack
8. Position Problems
9. Stack Problems
10. Card Problems
Part Four: The Endgame and Money Matters
11. Latter Stages of the Tournament: The Final Straight and Attacking Medium Stacks
12. How to Measure Your Success as a Tournament Player, and Determining a Tournament Bankroll
13. Conclusion
Glossary
Acknowledgments
The more you write on any topic the more help you need. This is especially true of poker. I should like to thank my editor, Richard Ember, and the staff at Kensington Books who have helped in the creation of this book. Alvin Tsang, my filmmaker, has done a sterling job of producing the DVDs, on a hopelessly short time scale. Thanks, Alvin. Thanks to the poker buddies who have been supportive. I especially want to thank Mike Shaso, who just cannot stop making money finishes in fast-structure tournaments, and poker author and expert Tony Guererra, who helps keep my poker head on straight.
Last, and by no means least, my wife, Susan, who is always willing to look over and improve my writing.
INTRODUCTION
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