Adjust Your Thinking Cap to Fit the Situation

"I'm frustrated and confused, Tom," E-mailer Mark began his letter. "Now that I've been playing the $100-$300 tournaments with some success, I haven't been able to win a dime in the $20 daily tournaments at my local cardroom. What's going on?!" Mark's lament is far from unique. Hopefully, I can shed some light on both the problem and the solution.

By the time that you have put a few thousand tournament miles under your belt, you realize that your opponents think at different levels of sophistication, depending on their tournament experience. The challenge is to figure out where they are in their thinking processes and to adjust your thinking cap to fit the situation. At the most basic level of thinking, you evaluate only your own hand. One step up the ladder is what you think your opponent holds. Moving up one more rung, you decide what your opponent thinks you have. The highest step on the tournament thought-process ladder is determining the way that your opponent expects you to play your hand if you have what he thinks you have – and how you think that he will play his hand if he has what you think he has.

However, thinking at the highest level sometimes can backfire on you. The reason that I often have difficulty playing in low buy-in tournaments as opposed to the higher buy-in events that I usually play is because I am up against a different mindset. That is, I am thinking at level D, for example, while my opponents are operating at level A. Many of the lower-limit tournament players I have battled simply play their hands and gamble the way that they see fit, rather than using the more advanced game strategy and higher level of logic that I am accustomed to defending against in major tournaments. It is easier to understand the play of a veteran high-limit tournament player who you know is thinking in more logical terms than it is to understand a less-experienced tournament opponent who doesn't know where he is in a hand. If even he doesn't know why he did what he did, how can you figure it out and make an optimal response?

For these reasons, if you are accustomed to thinking at a higher level of play, you might consider adjusting your thinking to that of your opponents who are working at a different level. In other words, don't always try to outthink them. I honestly believe that one reason higher-level tournament players sometimes do not fare well against less-sophisticated opponents is that they outthink themselves! They fall prey to "FPS," the fancy play syndrome that Mike Caro describes. They make fancy plays that might have a good long-term result against tough tournament foes, but fall flat against less-advanced opponents.

Lots of top tournament players seem to fall in love with their tricky plays, the ones that they like to use against talented, experienced opponents. But when they use these same imaginative plays against confused opponents, they just get called. Instead, they probably should value-bet their good hands and continue putting pressure on their opponents when they think they have the best of it. This is not to say that you should never make a deceptive move against lesser opposition, but you definitely should not overdo it.

Of course, the positive side is, when an opponent who does not operate at a higher level of tournament thinking occasionally enters the upper stratosphere of tournament play where his opponents are world-class competitors with bracelets up to their elbows, he becomes confused. The tactics that he used in the low-limit tournaments, which were successful in defeating opponents with skills equal to his, become transparent to higher-caliber opposition, and he loses. This should be music to your ears, Mark.

Thanks for your question, not only because it is educational, but because it gives me the perfect opportunity to mention that I recently revised my book Tournament Poker. In it you will find the thought-level insights that I have rephrased for this column, and a "zillion" techniques for winning poker tournaments at all buy-ins. The revisions are not extensive, as none of the strategy chapters on the 11 games played at the World Series of Poker have been changed; they are the same as in the original 1995 edition. However, I have added a new chapter, "Tournament Trends: Adjusting to Change," and have rewritten the chapter "Specialty Tournaments," which I hope will help you in playing some of the newer types of tournament formats. The tournament trends chapter gives you a rundown on what's new in tournament structures, plus some strategies for successfully adjusting to them. The chapter on special types of tournaments includes tips on playing the Tournament of Champions and similar multigame events, plus tag team, incremental rebuy, and bounty tournaments. I also have added the "Commandments of Conduct," a code of ethics for tournament players that I have written about in previous columns.

If you and I can properly adjust our thinking caps, hopefully we will meet one day soon in the winner's circle.

Editor's note: Tom McEvoy is the author of Tournament Poker and the co-author with T.J. Cloutier of the Championship series of poker books, all of which are available through Card Player. For more information, visit www.pokerbooks.com.