Patterns in Bust-Outs

Those brave souls who subject themselves to poker tournament after poker tournament might be forgiven if they find the whole adventure a bit trying. Everyone who enters a poker tournament eventually loses all of his chips (with one exception, of course). Getting knocked out of a tournament is never fun, but it does at least have the potential to be instructive.

When exiting a tournament, the first thing you should do is give yourself some time and space before even attempting to analyze your play. It can be difficult psychologically to go from competing for a large amount of prize money to walking out of the casino and trying to find your rental car in the parking lot (I speak from experience). That said, you should make an effort to write down all relevant details from your bust-out hand, and any other pivotal hands from the event, while those details are still fresh in your mind. Once you’ve had enough time to settle your thoughts, the real analysis can begin.

Don’t spend time thinking about how lucky or unlucky you got. That doesn’t help, and it’s entirely out of your control, anyway. Here are a few other negative responses to busting out that you should avoid: (1) blaming bad luck; (2) blaming an opponent’s bad play; (3) blaming your own bad play, overly focusing on the bust-out hand itself. Instead, try to come up with solid arguments about why you should have or should not have played your hands the way that you did. Look at the tournament as a whole. Do you need to start playing looser? Tighter? More aggressively? More passively? This can be a difficult task, but here’s where your bust-out hand itself may hold some clues.

Study the details of your bust-out hand, and while you’re at it, compare it to all of the other bust-out hands that you’ve logged over your recent tournament history. The first question to ask yourself is how many big blinds you had when you got knocked out. If you routinely have seven or eight big blinds or less when you go broke, you are probably playing too tight. It takes a while for a tournament stack size to get whittled down to single digits in terms of big blinds, and there are generally lots of opportunities to get your chips in with reasonable prospects of success before your stack gets really small. Obviously, there are exceptions, and that’s where your tournament-by-tournament notes will help. If you lose a huge pot that drops you down to single-digit big blinds and you go on to bust out on the next hand, you can be sure that you didn’t miss any chances to gather chips. But if your bust-out pattern is that you blind down to a very short stack before going broke in most events, you probably need to open up your game more.

Conversely, if your bust-out hand often takes place when you’re sitting on a stack size of 50 big blinds or more, you’re probably playing too loose. It is inevitable that you will occasionally lose a big pot while sitting on a good stack and go from above average to broke in one hand. That’s just the nature of tournament poker. If, however, you’re routinely dusting off big stacks in the early portion of events, you probably need to slow down and tighten up. A loose-aggressive style of play is far more effective in the middle and late stages of a tournament than in the early stages.

What about your hand strength? Do you almost always have a better hand than your opponent when you bust out? If so, you might be playing too passively. In tournaments, you can’t afford to wait around until you’re sure that you have the best hand. It’s hard to be sure that you have the best hand, and if you need to be sure before you commit your stack, you’ll never accumulate enough chips to be a threat to win an event. Players who “always” have the best hand when they bust out often lament their bad luck and wonder why they can’t catch a break. They likely forget all of the times that their good hands held up prior to their bust-out, and fail to realize that all of those good hands still didn’t leave them with enough chips to contend.

On the other hand, if you almost always have the worst hand when you bust out, you’re probably playing too aggressively. A big source of profit is putting an opponent to a decision with a semibluff, knowing that even if you get called, you’ll have some equity in the pot. But if you employ this move all the time, you’re going to run into a hand and go broke. The idea is to make aggressive plays that have a decent probability of success. If you always find yourself on the wrong side of the weighted coin in your all-in confrontations (and hence your bust-out hands), you might be getting a little reckless with your bluffs.

A good player will sometimes bust out by trying an aggressive play that doesn’t work out. He will sometimes bust out by getting in a lot of chips with a good hand and taking a bad beat. He will usually have a medium-size stack (15-40 big blinds) when he goes broke, although once in a while he will bust out when short-stacked or deep-stacked. The bigger a good player’s stack is when he busts out, the more equity he likely had in the pot. Keep these guidelines in mind when reviewing your own bust-outs and determining your own personal areas of improvement as a player.

I hope this column has helped you to develop a good approach to analyzing your results, and maybe even made it a little easier to deal with that sinking feeling of getting eliminated from a poker tournament.

Matt Matros has busted out of almost every tournament he has ever played. He is also the author of The Making of a Poker Player, and is a featured coach for stoxpoker.com.