The Tournament Grind

I wasn’t ever a tournament grinder until limit hold’em died. I had played them from time to time, but I always saw tournaments as a novelty, a device to make the game better and attract players to the poker room. I played cash games at the World Series of Poker for three years before I ever played a tournament. Back then it was in April, monthly forecast of sunshine and highs in the 80’s, and perfect for me to hit before a summer of guiding the river. I would go play cash games and wonder what nutjobs would plop down that much loot to play a tournament, poker’s equivalent to the lottery. I wished they would come play in the cash games and salivated when one sat in the evening, declaring that they just busted the $1,500 yadda-yadda-yadda.

It was 2006 when things really started to change. The WSOP got moved to the dog days of the Mojave summer, beginning in late July. I went out with a bankroll, a backer, and a desire to go win some tournaments, simply for the ultimate goal of attaining some sort of sponsorship deal and thus attaining passive income. The online sites were everywhere, TV attention was at its peak, and the money being thrown at poker players was ridiculous. I’m like, man, if I can be a red pro at Full Tilt Poker, then I can make $100,000 per year in passive income, and then the stresses of fluctuation are non-existent.

Then UIGEA happened and the online market was cut in half overnight. Not so many sponsorship dollars, especially for Americans. By this point I was with a backer and purely pursuing tournaments, and let me tell you, there is an insane amount of variance in tournament poker. There is so much variance in tournaments that it is impossible to reach the “long term” in a lifetime when playing live. There is a high rate of attrition early in a tournament player’s career. If a rookie tournament grinder has a normal dry spell, going a hundred tournaments without a good score, then they’re going broke and hitting the showers, or going back to cash games.

Playing tournaments only is extremely difficult in a live setting. Online you can play thirty tournaments a day for smaller stakes, reducing your variance. Playing live however, you have to deal with higher rake, travel expenses, and the stress of living out of a suitcase in casinos. For years now I will only take a few poker trips a year, and when I take them I either go somewhere juicy and work as hard as possible, or I will incorporate poker into a vacation and focus hard on poker for the time of the tournament, and then enjoy the destination the rest of the time. These become tax writeoffs, of course, but you gotta make money for the writeoffs to be relevant.

Winning tournaments in the small regional fields is easy, but as the field size and quality of opposition increases, it becomes more and more difficult to make money regularly playing tournament poker, and variance goes through the roof. I don’t care how good you are, it takes a lot of run good to wade through a field of thousands of entrants. Assuming we always get the money in with aces versus kings and accumulate well enough to maintain our stack, our odds to win in various field sizes are:

16 entrants: 45.1 percent
128 entrants: 24.8 percent
1028 entrants: 13.7 percent

Even when putting it in as good as possible every time for all of our chips, it’s still really hard to win a poker tournament, and thus there is high variance in dollars and dry spells between scores.

It all comes back to balance at this point. If what you do is play tournaments, then you need to do other things too. You need to have a source of passive income, whether it be cash games on the side, collecting rent on real estate purchased with tournament scores, or writing for Card Player magazine. Having strict bankroll management is very important. Buy yourself something nice after a good score as a reward, but put most of it in your box or in the bank because you may have to spend it on buy-ins over the next year.

Most people playing in a poker tournament have nowhere close to the bankroll necessary to be playing in it. A reasonable bankroll is one hundred buy-ins, but busting a hundred tournaments straight without anything special happening is way more common than you would think. If you’re living and traveling off of that bankroll too, then it’s just a matter of time until Bustoville unless there is something else supplementing that bankroll.

It’s important to experience where you are at, no matter if it’s Chester, Pennsylvania or Aruba. I saw somebody say on Facebook that they could tell you all the neat cities they’ve been to, but they can’t tell you anything of note about them except for what the casino’s like. That’s just tragic. Harrah’s Chester (Philadelphia) was the worst casino experience in my career, but I had an absolute blast in the town, enjoying the campus pub, a Flyers game, and all the history in downtown Philly between tournaments and cash games. Twenty years from now you’re not going to remember the casino unless you won something there, but you will remember the adventure you had on the side.

Then you bink, and you’re rich, and you think you’re never going to be broke again. You’re wrong unless you do it right. Protect your bankroll, without it you cannot work. As you lose money, play smaller, not bigger. Accept victory with humility and gratitude, because even though you’re good at poker, you’re still a lucky bastard the day you win a tournament. Enjoy the ride. ♠

Bryan Devonshire has been a professional poker player for nearly a decade. With over $2 million in tournament earnings, he also plays high stakes mixed games against the best players in the world. Follow him on Twitter @devopoker.