When You Hit That Stone Wall in Tournaments

Tom McEvoy note: This essay is excerpted from How to Win the Championship, which my writing partner for the Championship series of books, T.J. Cloutier, has just finished writing with the able assistance of our longtime editor Dana Smith. Look for it on bookshelves in a few months.


"When I get to a certain point in a tournament, I fade. What can I do?" Lots of online players have told me that when they get to a certain level in a tournament, they seem to hit a stone wall. They start in a tournament with 700 players, for example, and when it gets down to 150 players, they bomb. Sometimes they don't give me all the facts, but in most cases they had enough money to last a while longer. But when they hit the higher blinds, they were so short-stacked that they couldn't get past them.



If you get to a certain spot and hit that stone wall, you'd better take a look at what you have been doing at that level. Maybe you did something you shouldn't have done; indeed, at some point, it's highly likely that you did something wrong. Maybe it wasn't just bad luck that you got knocked out.



Ask yourself, "What quality of hands have I been playing?" When you're playing online, bring up the history of the hands you've played. By looking at your hand history, you can determine whether you were playing too loose or too tight, or just plain badly. Or, in a live tournament, you might write down every hand you play. When you get knocked out of a tournament, you should be able to remember your last 10 hands, at the least. Sure, you're going to get drawn out on occasionally, but that's just part of the game. I know people who have played real well for three days in a four-day tournament. Then, they get dealt pocket kings and push their chips into the middle. Somebody takes a flyer against them with an A-10 or A-J, pops an ace on the board, and takes them out. You can't help it when those things happen.



But that won't happen all the time.



When you're running bad – and everybody who's ever played poker has unlucky streaks – you play badly, too. It's a combination of both. I've caught myself doing it. If I'm running bad, I'll sometimes make errors that a schoolboy wouldn't make. You start taking chances to make up for the chips you've lost. Then, you get in a hurry and start putting more gamble into your play when you know you shouldn't. If you're a good player, you know that if you just let the natural run of cards come, you're going to get the money over a period of time. That's just the way it is – the better players are going to get the money. It might take a very long time for the percentages to catch up with you and do what they're supposed to do for you, but sooner or later, everybody supposedly holds the same number of good hands.



Another reason you might hit a stone wall when you get deep into a tournament that started with lots of players is that the players you were beating up on to stay alive were bad players. Now, most of them are gone. Some of them are still in there with chips because they've been lucky, but once 550 players are gone from a field of 700, most of the players still in action can play poker. At least they have a semblance of being good players, certainly a lot better than the original crew. This means that you have to play better, too. You can't make any mistakes. Get crazy, and you're gone.

Whether you're playing online or in a casino, you can see what your opponents are doing, how they're playing, and what they're winning with – and who's playing lots of pots and who isn't. You have to adjust your play to their play, and to the constantly changing circumstances in tournaments. Just because you won a pot when you raised with an A-J from late position and the blind called you with a weaker ace doesn't mean that play is going to work for you later on.



Review the hands you've played, look at the position from which you played them, analyze your actions, and make a plan to correct your mistakes. That way, instead of butting your head against that stone wall, you should be able to break through it on your way to the top. And if you can do that, we should be meeting each other one day soon in the winner's circle.

Tom McEvoy will be conducting a poker seminar at Hollywood Park Casino on April 2. Call (888) 293-2186 for details. McEvoy is a representative of PokerStars.com and is the voice of ProPlay. Find out more at www.ProPlaylive.com/tommcevoy.