Tournament Hold 'em Hand By Hand:. Neil D. Myers
If you play these tournaments skillfully however, making the money can be a regular event and a top-three finish can occur as often as once every twenty to twenty-five tournaments or so. To the unskilled you will appear to be “a very lucky SOB.” You will know otherwise. Most times you will still bust-out but when wins do come they will more than compensate for this. If with fields of eighty to 350 players you are not placing in the money at least one in fifteen times or so, then you are probably doing something wrong. The reason that you can do this well is because so many other players are clueless about correct fast-structure tournament strategy. Of course, you can have runs where you win more frequently and you can have extended periods where you only make low-place finishes or finish out of the money entirely. However, when you do make it to the final three or win, you want the prize to be large enough to compensate for the many times you make a low-money or no-money finish. The strategies I recommended in this book will give you the best shot at a high-money finish but you cannot avoid busting out many times. It is the very nature of tournament play as currently structured.
3 Stack size and Blinds. Many tournaments seem to start with a stack that is about thirty times the opening Big Blind. Personally, this is the minimum I find acceptable. Less than that and the element of luck is going to be the dominant factor in the tournament very quickly. Ideally, I like to see the stack size at least fifty times the opening Big Blind. This enables you to play some real poker. The larger your chip stack in relation to the Blinds, the more options you have as to how to play a hand and vice versa. Since more skilled players implicitly have wider playing choices, bigger stacks in relation to the Blinds favor players who know how to take advantage of them. Of course, stack size and starting Big Blind size are not the only factors. How quickly the Blinds rise, and when antes appear are also important. In some tournaments the Blinds rise as fast as every fifteen minutes, others much more slowly, as long as half an hour to forty-five minutes. This makes a big difference. Of course, all fast-structure tournaments are going to finish in less than a day and it is rare to find a tournament that lasts more than ten hours. Recently some casinos are promoting “Super Stack tournaments” where players begin with stacks of 100 or even 200 times the Big Blind and the opening rounds are as long as forty-five minutes or an hour. These events do favor the more highly skilled and are perceived as such, so the casinos that offer them often charge high entry fees. However, they still have to get them over inside of a few hours, so what generally happens is that antes appear after the fourth, fifth, or sixth rounds, and grow fast. The overall effect is that these tournaments accelerate rapidly at a certain point and then the play becomes just about identical to that of any other multi-table fast-structure tournament that starts with smaller stacks. Arnold Snyder, in his book The Poker Tournament Formula and his website, has tables and tools to help you calculate the speed of a tournament. Some mathematically inclined posters at Snyder’s site have even created software tools for determining the velocity and acceleration rate of tournaments. These are fascinating and worth looking at, but in my mind are overkill when used to determine the desirability of playing in a specific tournament. I prefer to play in tournaments where the Blinds are rising no more than twenty minutes and the antes do not appear until at least the fourth round.
So in summary my personal ideal fast-structure multi-table tournament is one where the entry fee is $100–$300, the field consists of one-hundred to 250 players, the starting stacks are fifty times the Big Blind, the Blinds rise every half an hour or so, and antes do not appear until after the fourth level at least. I stress that these are my personal preferences.
Probably some astute readers will be able to persuade me that this is not ideal and that there may be a better mathematical formula for working out what ideal is. However, practically, if you are trying to decide if a tournament is worth your time, money, and effort I believe these three guidelines will prove useful.
These guidelines are meant for tournaments taking place in land-based casinos and card rooms. I have played in at least ten times as many Internet tournaments as land-based ones. This is because I live at least two and a half hours from the nearest casino and so have many more opportunities to play online than on land. Despite this fact I prefer land-based over online, because when I can see players, I feel I have another arsenal of weapons at my command. I can read tells, and observe when a player is tired, upset, emotional, jubilant, over-confident, arrogant, sleepy, drunk, upset, frustrated, or angry. These emotions affect how people play and to some extent how I play against them. I can see none of this online. Again, this is a personal preference and online tournaments are abundant, frequent, varied, and many offer entry fees far lower and prizes far larger than many of the smaller tournaments offered by land-based casinos.
Online, a tournament with a buy-in of $100–$500 will tend to attract a far higher caliber of player than one with a similar buy-in at a land-based casino. Internet card rooms frequently offer tournaments that range in buy-in from $5 to $50 with the Blinds rising every nine to twelve minutes or so. The lack of a physical deal means that more hands can be played per tournament hour so tournaments of this type are analogous in playing style, player type, and structure to the multi-table tournaments described earlier in land-based casinos with larger buy-ins. Some Internet card rooms offer very slow-structure tournaments for buy-ins of less than $100 and often less than $50. These provide an opportunity to get the feel of, and practice strategies and tactics for the high-profile, high-buy-in, slow–structure tournaments I described earlier; the glamour events of poker. If you want to play in these you would do well to practice in these online tournaments first. It is not of course exactly the same but it is a very low-cost simulation.
The General Method of Winning Tournament Play Used in This Book
This book offers you a three-layered method of tournament play. This method will be your default strategy. You will only modify it if you get a specific read on a player indicating that this read overrides all other considerations, or if you are in the latter stages of the tournament and have amassed a very large stack.
I’ll deal with how you handle very large stacks later in the text. Regarding getting a specific read on a player, let’s say you are on the Button and you have a pair of jacks. There has been one standard raise by a player from early position whom you have pegged as very tight and conservative. You are almost certain that he will only raise from this seat with AA, KK, or AKs. Do not re-raise with your pocket jacks. Instead you could call and see if you flop a set, or if he is willing to bet on the Flop, or you may take the more conservative route of folding. I stress that to make this modification you must know your opponent very well. Otherwise stick to the method as described. The method assumes you have a competitive stack of over thirty Big Blinds or over forty if the round includes antes. If your stack dwindles you will need to modify your play, as I will describe.
The first and most important layer of tournament play addresses positional plays. These form the bedrock of your playing strategy. The first question you will ask about position pre-Flop is:
CAN I PROFITABLY PLAY FROM THIS POSITION?
This is an easy question to answer, but the answer may at first surprise you: not unless you are on the Button, in the Cut-Off seat, or one to the right of the Cut-Off. These three seats are the only seats that you will ever play a hand in unless one of the two rules (concerning stack size and cards) below modifies that decision!
Astute readers will grasp that cards are not paramount, position is. This may seem like poker heresy to some of you, and for cash play you may have a point (though cash players frequently underestimate the power of position too), but this is not cash play. In fast-structure tournaments you do not have the luxury of waiting for good cards, because they do not occur frequently enough. You have to take advantage of position so that you can maintain a competitive stack despite having a run of bad cards. No player can be successful in tournament play on the strength of cards alone.
Grasping the importance of the above point alone will take you a long way toward a winning tournament mind-set.
If you win a tournament approximately 20 percent of your stack will have been won as the result of positional plays alone. Also, these regular position plays will keep you ahead of the Blinds and help you grow a large stack. This is important because chip accumulation is vital to success, and in a fast-structure tournament chip accumulation is of necessity fast and furious.
If