Looking at tournament speed

Online poker tournaments are huge these days but you have to remember that the speed structure of these tournaments means that you have to get busy early on and throughout the tournament if you want to make the final table or win the event. Before we move on then it is instructive here to see how bookmakers operate. They essentially make money by many punters chasing the immediate lure of short term wins and consistent wins. This same principle applies to poker tournaments because although consciously all players go into a tournament looking to “win”……..a combination of being willing to accept a minor cash and not having the right balance in their game means that few players succeed in online poker tournaments long time and the strong players exploit this weak-tight mentality. A very aggressive game can win any large MTT event and the WSOP main event is a good example of this.

There is a huge misconception that the early levels of tournament play are a stage in which you should play tight. The idea is that you do not win that much in terms of chips and so it isn’t worth the risk. This is incorrect for several reasons. Firstly if the blinds are say 10-20 and your stack is 2000 for example then winning an extra 30 in chips and taking your stack from 2000 to 2030 isn’t going to make that much difference. But this is really taking a short term view of a long term situation. Two things are at work here and firstly the “dead money” and the weak players will be around in greater quantity during the early stages of the event. If you play very tightly during this stage then you deny yourself a chance to get access to these weak players and when you start to open up your game during the middle stages then not only will you have a far smaller stack in terms of the number of big blinds but you also are going to be up against better players on average and far bigger stack sizes.

 However during the early stages then you are not just stealing blinds as the blinds are relatively insignificant. What you are doing is trying to find situations where you can stack someone or move them from the hand or even value bet them and win chips that are far in excess of the blinds. Let us say that you win 300 in chips during level one where the blinds are 10-20 by forcing a weak player to call you down with the worst hand or because you forced them to lay down the best hand. This is the same number of chips that you could have won at a far higher level when the blinds are 100-200 and you simply steal raise. If you can win two lots of blinds per orbit without risking your stack then you will likely win the event and in fact you probably will.