Tourneys Taught Me Fear.

You are not a Poker Player until you are asked this a few hundred times:

"Is there really a difference between tourneys and cash games?"

The short answer is "Yes." But since we are not limited to morse code, I usually give a longer but still simple answer.  This is the place where I like to start the discussion, and I suggest you try to start here as well the next time you are asked to discuss tourneys-versus-cash games.

"I would never EVER fold Aces preflop in a cash game."

Indicating that in a tournament, I might.  That should be enough to sit them down.


I remember prepping for the first-ever "biggest tourney" held in the Philippines.  It was the night before, and I was discussing basic strategies with my wife - who was playing my second seat.  (We had decided that she would play it instead of sell it, since the experience would dwarf the value of the money from the seat-sale.  Even though the seat back then cost php22,000 for a 1M Event.)

Suddenly she asked a simple question:  "What if I get Aces on the first hand and someone goes all-in?"

I remember telling her to call, of course, but not without some sighing and head-shaking.

We were playing this tournament to win, for sure, but we were also playing to enjoy the experience.  I did not want my wife - an extremely casual home-game player at best - to go through all the anxiety and heartbreak of a first-hand bustout.  It would break her heart.

Maybe I told her to fold.  Maybe I told her to pretend she arrived late and the Aces got mucked unseen.

Maybe I was giving advice based on Emotional EV.


"What if I am first to act preflop?" she asked as a follow-up.

This time I remember exactly what I answered - although I don't recall why: "Raise 1/3 of your stack"

Yep.  With the blinds at 25-50, my advice was for her to open-raise it to 7,000 and snap-call a shove.  I wanted to make sure her Aces would not go into a five-way battle.

That may seem harshly noobish now, but I tell you that story to tell you something I do believe in that I first recall hearing from Colin Moshman, and then Matthew Hilger:

"The chips that you lose in a tournament are worth much more than the chips that you gain."

That reality makes all the difference for me between cash games and tournaments.  I would fold Aces preflop in a tournament, and there is more than one scenario where I would gladly do so.

The simplest scenario is in an online Double-or-Nothing Sit-and-Go.  I am on the bubble with 4500 in chips, and the five other players each have about 2100.  The blinds are high enough - say 300/600 - that they are basically in shovesville.  Someone shoves, someone calls, the stacks are about even.  I fold my Aces and let them rumble.  Best-case, the larger stack wins.  Worst-case, the shorter stack cripples the larger one and he is left with barely a small blind anyway.  We group-call him next hand.

The same dynamics apply on the bubble of a satellite event.  28 players win a seat, 29 players left.  As before, winning everyone's chips is no longer the objective.

A not-so-common scenario is in the early stages of a Major freeze-out tournament.  To really feel the heat on this one, let's define "Major" as "The WSOP Main Event."  Let's say we all have just around the starting stack and some maniacs raise, 3bet, shove preflop, and cold-call even before it gets to me.  Don't ask me why they do this - maybe they are all drunken oil tycoons.

I look down at Aces.

Time to do some math.

The first maniac opens about 40% of his range.  I have about 85% equity against his range.  The second maniac isolates with any pocket pair.  I have 80% on him.  The third guy enters any pot "that has lots of chips" with any two cards.  85% on him as well.  The cold-caller has suited-connectors and thinks his hand is live because "everyone has Ace-King" - I've got just under 80% on this optimistic sonofabitch.

I am crushing all their ranges.  I am going to quintuple up!

Except going up against all four of them reduces my chances to about 48%.  I am still the most likely to win the hand among the five of us, but more than half the time, my tournament is over.

Question:  Does flipping to chip up to 150,000 in Level 1 justify being out of the tourney 52% of the time?  I am the favorite to win the hand, but a dog to stay in the tournament.  To put this in perspective, let's say the average stack come Final Table would be somewhere in the area of 10 to 15 million.  How much does my 150,000 help me get there?

I am not enough of a math geek to know what ICM algorithms to apply in order to determine the $EV of chipping up to 150k in one hand versus being out of the tourney 52% of the time.  I just intuitively don't feel good about it.  Not after a $10,000 buyin, a transatlantic flight, and a world of anxiety.

Add another caller to that mix - some fool with a range of broadways and pairs - and my Aces are now 37% to win the hand.  63% of the time I am out of the tourney, 37% of the time I will have 180,000 in chips.  Is this worth it?

In a cash game, my risk-reward ratios are so much simpler.  Just the money I have to put in versus the money I stand to win.  Ten thousand bucks to win Fifty thousand?  My my, the pot is laying me 5 to 1.  Meanwhile I am barely a 2 to 1 dog to take it all down.  Easy call.

In a tournament, my ten-thousand dollar buyin is at risk.  And the reward?  Absolutely unknown - somewhere between a sort-of-shoo-in to day 2, and a slightly (who knows how slight?) better chance to finish ITM in a few days.

Would you make the call?

I can hear players all over saying the same thing:  "If you can't make that call, you probably shouldn't be playing the tournament to begin with."

I am not sure I can disagree there.

"So which do you prefer?" is a common follow-up question.

Cash Games.  It should be obvious by now, but I try spell it out anyway:  "I prefer an activity that gives me more than one shot at success.  I prefer an activity where mistakes can be made and not everything is on the line in one go.  I prefer playing one hand at a time if I may.  And most importantly, I prefer not to play scared."

Yes, I confess, tournaments fill me with dread.

Stop Whining and Start Winning

The main pitfall of being identified as a Poker Coach has always been the whining.  It is as if there is a neon sign above my head that says "Vent all your frustrations here."

While I do welcome the opportunity to do players the sounding-board service, there are limits to it.  I haven't defined the limits, maybe I should.  One article I read long ago was written by a coach who gave guidelines on how and when to tell bad-beat stories.

I do not recall his guidelines, so I made some of my own:

1. Your bad beat story must actually qualify as a bad beat - you are allowed to get this wrong the first time, and you will receive a primer on the differences between coin-flips, coolers, draw-outs, and bad beats.
2. You have five minutes to tell me your bad beat story.
3. Do not begin to tell your story until all your facts and the sequence of events are straight.
4. You cannot repeat any bad beat story you tell me to anyone else.

Is your bad beat story really worth telling?  Or is your listener going to shrug and say "meh, standard"...?

These guidelines are not just there for the sake of my aching ears, they are there for the sake of the storyteller's health.

The first rule is there because I want students to have the appropriate emotions for the appropriate events.  I do not want them to feel like the entire world is conspiring against them just because they lost a hand that they were actually a slight underdog to win.

"I shoved with AK and he called with pocket threes!  Unbelievable!  I can't catch a break!"

The second rule is there because I don't believe in drawing out drama.  I believe in feeling an emotion, expressing it responsibly, and letting it go.  My personal experience - not only with bad beat storytellers, but also with people who are in a life-funk in general - is that the longer they sit inside that emotion, the harder it is to get out of it.

The more you churn, the more you burn.  Man, do I know some major churners!

Five minutes means less churn time.  Five minutes also means the emotional expressor has a responsibility both to himself and his listener.  We are having this conversation because I want to pull you out of your funk, so don't spend all your energy trying to pull me into it.

The third rule is there to protect the storyteller from flying off.  It keeps us all in touch with reality.  When told properly, the story can be taken in a proper context, and we can feel better about it. 

"I raise from the button and this guy who hates me 3bets a ridiculous amount...!  No wait, I think he raised and I reraised and he 4bet...anyway, we are all-in by the turn, but the flop was..."

Exasperating.

First of all, you don't know that the guy hates you.  Second, if you recall that his 3bet sizing was about quadruple your initial raise, you might see that it was still quite standard.  Third, yes, you opened and he 3bet.  Fourth, you need to clue me in on what hand you had before you tell me about the post-flop action.  Fifth, you need to tell me about the flop and the actions before you tell me about the turn...


In my attempt to get the complete situational picture, I am also attempting to ground the storyteller.

A lot of times, the storyteller feels a lot better once he has taken the time to get his story straight.  Instead of being re-raised by "an asshole who hates his guts," he realizes he was up against a decent player who had a better hand.  That was something he was too busy metagaming to see at that moment.

The fourth rule is another anti-churn measure.  You came to me, you vented, we felt bad together, then we moved on together.  Let's move on.  Retelling the story for any purpose other than as a learning example serves up a double whammy.  One, you travel back in time to the place where you felt bad.  Two, you take someone with you.

The story is in the past, you are in the present, and the future is ahead of you.  The sooner you stop whining, the sooner you can start winning.

I have been taken back to the same bad place so many times by the same person.  Different stories, but all the same.  It has happened often enough that the title of this article was supposed to be "Quit Bitching or Quit Poker."

Perhaps that was too harsh, so I changed the title.  But you know what?  I find it to be true.

In The Poker Mindset, we are taught to "Understand and accept the realities of poker."

Once we accept certain realities, they become truisms.  Truisms are so obvious, they do not need mentioning.  If someone comes up to me and complains about "that goddamned sun setting every goddamned day," I would just assume he hates the rest of his life as well.

Accept the realities of the game  then set them aside.  Luck, variance, card-dead runs, bad reads, slow-rollers.  They do not merit mentioning anymore.  They just are, like trees in a forest. That is the landscape we are on.

The sun rises, the sun sets.  Aren't we already aware that we work around this reality with light bulbs?

Read, Weep, or Reap.

In this particular hand, a student of mine had ACES.  As anyone would want to do when dealt this - the strongest of all possible starting hands in Texas Holdem - my student raised the pot.  A previous limper and one other caller came along for the ride.

The flop was quite ragged, and JACK-High.  In fact, you could not have asked for a more ragged dry flop like J93 rainbow.

Like a true fish, an opponent probe bets into the raiser - less than a quarter of the pot.  My student raises over the donkbet - just barely over the minimum raise.

A mistake, of course:  not the kind of mistake that costs you immediately, but the kind that creates opportunities for more mistakes.  Why?  Because it was not a definitive action.  It creates confusion.  We'll get into that later.


Back to the hand, the opponent RE-RAISES ...just over the minimum re-raise.

This is that moment when we wonder if we are still ahead, or if the opponent is a total tool.

Either way, we can be sure that both parties are sufficiently confused by now.  My student decides to flat call.

The turn brings another JACK, and our tenacious-but-indecisive opponent bets again.  A third of the pot.

Decision time, once again, for my student.  He throws in another min-raise.  The hand is a technical nightmare in progress, considering this is the microstakes.

welcome to the world of the min-bet-min-raise-min-reraise

My student tries to capture his feel of that moment:

"...what i was thinking was that when the villain reraise me on the flop he had a set of Jacks, then the other jack appeared so I thinked ok he does not have it. Then he raise again and I did not know where I was standing."

To which one veteran player bluntly responds:

"...villain reraise you on the flop and you are thinking he has set of jacks and YOU CALL?? horrible."


I won't have to finish this hand to tell you the moral of this story:

IF I HAVE A READ, I WILL GO WITH IT.

I always advocate the importance of information towards making a decision, but as I am playing a game where I do not have the luxury to wait for complete information, I will almost always find myself in a spot where I simply have to decide.

Make the best of what information I have, use my experience to best interpret it, decide what it means, and decide what I am going to do about it.

Just DECIDE.

So now the corollary to the moral of this story - which is the point our veteran observer makes:

I WILL ALIGN MY ACTIONS WITH MY DECISIONS.

I cannot decide that I am beat and continue with near-hopeless odds.  I cannot decide that I am allergic to shrimps and then go ahead and eat a barrel of it.  I cannot decide that my dream is to become a lawyer and then not take the bar exam.

So I threw in my small blind's worth on the matter:

"...if you really think he had a set, then go with your read and fold. i don't care if your read is wrong, you have to go with it IF that is truly your read. by calling you are ignoring your own read. if you keep doing that, your reads will not improve - how are you ever going to play every hand the best way you can if you can't trust yourself? calling should mean "my read is i am ahead" and not "i hope i am wrong"


If we have a read, we just go with it.  WE CANNOT BE AFRAID TO GET IT WRONG!  We will be wrong - often.  Many many many times our reads will be wrong, and we are going to pay for it.  But that is the price we must be willing to pay in order to gain the experience and do better the next time.

I would rather lose a stack going with a wrong read than lose it ignoring a correct one.


If you are - like me - into finding parallels between poker-behaviors and life-behaviors, we are looking at a very basic human flaw:  a chronic inexplicable inability to do the right thing.

What is at the root of this?  Why do we lie, cheat, or steal even when we know we are gonna get caught?  Why do we say mean things that we will regret saying later when the dust clears?  Why do we insist on only leaving ourselves a thirty-minute drive-time-window when we know from every previous experience we had that the drive takes an hour?

1. We don't think long-term.  We see the short-term reward and hope we won't have to pay for it later.

2. We let our emotions run our lives.  We know we are not in good shape, but we feel that blind aggression and bringing anything in our path down will make us feel better when we ourselves go down later.  We let emotions ruin our lives, instead of enhance it.

3. We do not trust our own experiences.  We do not trust ourselves enough.  We say "I hope I am wrong" and then close our eyes and jump into the fire.


Yes, I am aware that there are many ways to play this hand, and none of them have to be black-and-white-wrong-or-right, but I Iike to see microstakes poker is an exercise in clarity and decision-making.  The sneakiness, trap-setting, and other deviousness that make people fall in love with the game can be practiced later.

Practice being truthful first.  Let them pay us off every time they refuse to believe.  They will, because we are wired to a default setting that seeks proof before belief.  They will pay for the proof that we have the nuts - many times - before we gain their trust.  Only then - when we finally gain their trust - can we go ahead and throw in a curve ball or two.


On the flop, in this example, I must practice living decisively by deciding if my ACES are ahead.  Then I must take the action that best aligns with my decision.  

I am ahead, I want to get value, so I RAISE with the intention of getting the entire stack in. 
When I have a hand I can bet for value, I want to be betting that hand as soon as possible.  I Check the SPR.  I want to commit my opponent to the mistake he is about to make. 

I am behind, I do not have the outs and odds to improve to a winning hand, so I FOLD.

And if I am wrong, I can live with myself.  A better version of myself that hopefully learned from the mistake.