Tournaments and Cash

As I’m writing this, the WSOP is well under way in Vegas. Superstars of all forms of poker are battling it out for money, glory, and bracelets. The sheer amount of poker talent that you see day in and day out at the final tables of WSOP events is extraordinary. After seeing the best of the best get to the end of these tournaments over and over, it’s hard to argue against poker as a skill game.

Unfortunately, some cash-game players look down on tournament pros, saying that tournaments are just about getting lucky for a few days at a time and that the real skill is in cash games. There are some great cash-game players who get it, though. One of these is Phil Galfond. He was in town for the $5,000 six-max Pot-Limit Omaha (PLO) event and tweeted about how he doesn’t like the idea of lammers in tournaments. You see, in the Pot-Limit Omaha and heads-up tournaments, they give you three separate starting stacks, one in chips, and two lammers that you can redeem for your other stacks at any time. He tweeted this: “For those asking, I don’t like lammers bc tournaments are about possessing skill at all stack sizes. This is the #worldseriesof35bbpoker”

He brings up a good point that cash-game players often miss. The real skill in being a very successful tournament player is in being competent to very good at many different stack sizes and being able to adjust between those stack sizes flawlessly.

Cash-game players are almost certainly better at playing the early stages of tournaments when the stacks are super deep and fundamental deep-stack play is what gets the money.
However, how much analysis of 20-30 big blind (BB) stack play have the best cash game players really done outside of those who play cap no-limit or Pot-Limit Omaha tables? Most of a tournament is played with average stacks of 60BB or lower. If you are used to playing in games where you auto reload if you’re under 100BB, the strategies will be different than if you are playing a stack that fluctuates between 20 and 100BB.

In addition to knowing your stack size, it’s important to know your opponents’ stack sizes. You would play your 100BB stack differently if the two players to your left have 20BB than if they have 50 or 60 BBs. This is definitely a consideration in cash games, but usually not as much because, unless you’re playing against lots of short-stackers, many cash-game players top up to the max buy-in when they are low.

This is an important consideration to think about when playing at all stages of the tournament, but especially when you are at the final table. Early in the tournament, it’s important to be aware of your opponents’ stack sizes so that you know what your opening ranges should be and how to adjust your play to the way they are playing their chips. When you’re nearing the final table or are at it, stack sizes become important because of Independent Chip Model (ICM) considerations. You would play K-Q very differently against an opener when you have a 25BB stack if everyone at the table also has stacks of 25BB than if two guys had 10BB, seven had 25BB, and one had 70BB. This was a real world situation this year in the first open event of the WSOP. Going into the final table, Trevor Pope had 3.5 million chips and his next closest competitors had 630,000. The shortest stack was around 400,000 and they were playing 12,000-24,000. Because of this dynamic, Pope knew that he could just open 80 percent of the pots for a min-raise and there wasn’t really a whole lot anyone could do about it unless he doubled some people up early or some of the short stacks confronted each other and someone chipped up. This became a very interesting final table to watch, even though it seemed as though the outcome was predetermined. Pope could only really lose if he got coolered several times or if he allowed himself to get out of line multiple times. The other players were the ones to watch. Knowing the ICM situations they were being put into and understanding stack sizes and prizepool jumps became the name of the game. These skills are something tournament players have to be well versed in. It used to be that people would say they were only playing for first place because that’s where all the money is. The truth is, there are situations where taking a coin flip or making a risky play that increases your chances to win first place but are overall ICM suicide are huge mistakes.

I don’t play many tournaments these days because of the time commitment and variance involved, but I do recognize that tournaments and cash games both take quite a bit of skill to be successful in. The skill sets are many and varied, but they are present and the fact that short-term luck is at play in both should not be lost on anyone. ♠

Gavin Griffin was the first poker player to capture a World Series of Poker, European Poker Tour and World Poker Tour title and has amassed nearly $5 million in lifetime tournament winnings. Griffin is sponsored by HeroPoker.com. You can follow him on Twitter @NHGG.