Why is this the case?

I was having a conversation with someone on a poker forum the other day who had a different opinion to mine regarding online poker tournaments. I personally did not think that you had as much time to acquire chips as what he did. I was looking at this from an angle of playing the games for profit. When you look at the massive variance that is in these things then a very aggressive tournament style can leave you going very long periods of time without any kind of serious pick up.

I often think that the best tournament style may just be a subtle blend of regular and consistent cashing but getting the odd very deep finish but without the tournament win. This may sound very strange at first because your optimal tournament finish should be to win……but is it? It is clear that everybody wants to win an event and if you asked a hundred players where they would like to finish then every single one of them would say to come first. However in very large fields then the dynamic shifts because many of the players will be bad players. But bad players by sheer definition play many more hands than they should but when a large number of bad players play more hands than they should then a fair percentage will acquire a lot of chips.

So as the tight-solid player then it is difficult to match the leading stacks during the early to middle stages without gambling in a similar way to what they do and this is especially the case when the fields get very large. So in my opinion then the optimal style that balances relatively consistent cashes and the odd big return could be the style that reduces the chances of winning. Let us look at a 2000 runner field either in a live event or an online event with a fast structure. A fair percentage of what people call “dead money” will still amass huge stacks during the early stages. This cannot be avoided, if you have 2000 players starting with 2000 in chips then there are four million in chips in circulation.

If you are sitting there and playing well and have doubled your stack to 4000 by the middle stages then you may be on the tournament curve but you are also massively behind the big stacks. If 1000 players are left and you stack is 6000 then you have done well to increase your stack three fold. But those extra 4000 in chips is a pitifully small number when you look at the fact that 2 million in chips have been circulated amongst the remaining 1000 players. But they will not to be circulated in a linear fashion because the players at the top end will have got exceptionally lucky and will have amassed very big stacks. Also the field will have compressed as well and so the fish will now not only have larger stacks relative to your small stack but the number of moves that they can make against you increase while yours decrease against them which effectively makes them tougher opponents.