Small Buy-In Fast Tournaments - Part I

Many brick-and-mortar cardrooms and virtually all online poker sites have a variety of small buy-in, fast-structure multitable tournaments. These popular tournaments are great for players with limited poker bankrolls and for those wishing to improve their tournament skills. They often allow one or more rebuys and an add-on. Strangely enough, little has been written about them from a strategic point of view. Arnold Snyder, a well-known blackjack authority, has attempted to fill this gap with his book The Poker Tournament Formula. I hesitate recommending this book for a number of reasons. There are many more accurate and essential books on poker. He gets a lot of stuff wrong. Even when some of his recommendations are good, he often arrives at them through faulty reasoning. On the other hand, it is a good book, perhaps the only book, to get you thinking about what happens in these small tournaments. Stuff that can get a poker player to think is always good.



Snyder originates a complicated formula for determining the speed of a tournament, which he calls the patience factor. Dan Harrington's discussion of M and my columns on CPR (see the CardPlayer.com archives) cover this same material, but much more accurately. Your strategy should be based not upon the speed of the tournament as a whole, but on your current chip position in relation to current blinds. If your M (the number of rounds you can survive without playing a hand) is 20, you should base your strategy primarily on that fact. Whether the blinds will double and reduce your M to 10 in 15 minutes or four hours should not have much influence on your strategic decisions. Perhaps the only time it should influence your choices is when you have a borderline decision just before the blinds are about to escalate.



Snyder rates position as the primary factor in making many decisions, not your M. This too is wrong. First, you should calculate your M. When your M is small, as it often is in these tournaments, you should look for raising or moving all-in opportunities. Most of these occur when you are the first to voluntarily put money into the pot. His position-based strategy is too tight in early positions and too loose on the button (he recommends calling limpers and even one raiser based purely on position). In many cases, the aggressive strategies that he recommends for the late-position player are excellent, even though the logic used to create them is questionable.



The last thing I want to mention in this column is an exercise he recommends that I think is excellent. Years ago, Mike Caro recommended an exercise for poker students, which was to fold every hand in a small cash game for an hour (yes, even aces). This showed how minimal the costs of supertight play could be and gave them an idea of how their opponents reacted to this type of play. I have often recommended this exercise to students. Snyder recommends playing a small tournament by letting position determine your strategy, while only pretending to look at your cards. His exercise develops your skills in bluffing, reading opponents, and adjusting your strategy to your position and the tournament structure. While I haven't had a chance to try it, it seems like a very good way to develop those skills. I have always believed that all of the top players are capable of playing excellent loose poker when the situation demands it.



In the next parts of this series, I will look at more strategies for these small tournaments. I also want to devote a column to the topic of rebuys and add-ons. In the meantime, try to play a few of these small tournaments if you get the chance. Also, take an hour or so to try the exercises discussed above.



Steve "Zee" Zolotow, aka The Bald Eagle, is a successful games player. He currently devotes most of his time to poker. He can be found at many major tournaments and playing on Full Tilt, as one of its pros. When escaping from poker, he hangs out in his bar, Nice Guy Eddie's on Houston and Avenue A in New York City.