Head Games: Improve Your Tournament Game - Know Your Strengths and Weaknesses With Greg Mueller, Asher Conniff, and Matt Stout

Craig Tapscott: What are the three biggest strengths a tournament poker player must process to be successful and why?

Greg Mueller: I have been playing poker for a long time. I believe that patience and discipline play a huge roll in success in the game. You can’t force things in poker. You must have the ability to wait for favorable situations, whether it be starting hands, weaker opponents to show up at your table, timely spots and situations, or the table to break, etc.

Then I would say having versatility is an element in poker. It’s the innate ability to assess the table/situation/environment and be able to adapt and change play accordingly. In a tournament, the situation is constantly changing and the ability to see this and be able to change gears accordingly is essential. There are extreme differences. Perhaps you are the best player at the table with a huge stack (playing tons of hands and running the show) compared to being at a very tough table with a shorter stack (having to be extremely selective and waiting for the situation to improve for you). Players are constantly coming and going, and your chip stack is constantly changing as are the blinds. Tournaments are in a constant state of flux and you must be aware of this ongoing.

Last but not least, I have to say mental toughness. It’s huge. To acknowledge, understand, accept, and learn to embrace variance. Even the greatest tournament players can go a long time without a score. This is especially true when playing a grind like the daily WSOP events each summer. You must be able to play your best in every situation and try to forget about bad beats or bad plays made just minutes, hours, or days ago. Staying off tilt and being able to let these things go and regroup for the next tough decision is the only thing that matters.

Asher Conniff: First and foremost, a player must learn to accept variance. Tournament poker players need to have incredibly thick skin to deal with the variance involved on a day-to-day basis. Very little about tournament poker is “fair” in the short term. Worrying or stressing your luck, good or bad, is a total waste of focus and energy.

Patience is very important. Even the most aggressive tournament poker players are playing about 40 percent to 50 percent of hands, and that number is insanely high. Point being, tournament poker involves a lot of folding. Sometimes you’re going to have to fold hands you just hate to fold. Sometimes there’s a guy on your left picking on you, and sometimes you need to submit in the battles to win the wars. I believe that anyone who’s a naturally extremely patient human has a head start when it comes to poker. The key is to be able to stay patient while remaining aggressive.

And then there is happiness. It is the most underrated skill of being a tournament poker player. Not many people outside of poker, or even recreational players, understand what a grind it is to be a professional tournament player. The variance is huge, everyone feels they lost to an inferior player, and stakes are sometimes insanely high. Like any highly competitive, motivation-based industry, poker can easily chew you up and spit you out if you don’t keep a proper perspective. On the other hand, it’s a job that allows us to do whatever we want, whenever we want. It’s the ultimate freedom, and if pursued properly, can lead to the ultimate life of leisure and fun. So I think it’s really important for players to keep that perspective of how lucky we are to be able to do this with our time, how happy the game makes us, and what a solid community its created.

Matt Stout: I think one of the most important strengths that it takes to be successful as a tournament poker player is discipline. One aspect of this is the discipline that is necessary to make big folds and play your best throughout a tournament. Having this type of discipline can be even more important in tournaments than cash games, because if you make a bad call in a cash game you can reload, but in a tournament it can cost you everything.

Another aspect of the discipline needed that often goes overlooked is the discipline to play within your bankroll, not take too many shots, and to sell off or swap out an appropriate amount of your action based on the size of the buy-in for the tournament and your bankroll. Sometimes it even means just having the discipline to not play in a tournament at all if you can’t afford to or if it’s simply a tournament where your edge isn’t large enough to justify “taking a shot” at it.

Another element of what it takes to be a successful tournament player is patience. Obviously patience is something that helps someone in any form of poker, but in cash games you can get up and take a break or quit your session if you’re not feeling focused and know that you’re going to have difficulty playing your best game. You don’t have that option in tournaments, and you’re often going to find yourself structuring your entire day around someone else’s schedule while playing for huge, often life-changing money. And if you’re not in the right mood to be playing for beaucoup money, then that’s your problem. Sometimes you really have to dig deep to find the patience to play your “A” game.

The final ingredient that I think is crucial is mental toughness. Mental toughness is a difficult concept to pinpoint and explain; but I’ll sum it up by saying it’s the attribute that allowed me to travel the tour for years shortly after turning 21, take huge beats for life-changing money that led me to struggle personally, psychologically, and financially as a result, but to keep taking it on the chin and never give up. A quote I love regarding this is, “Success is a lot like getting pregnant. Everyone congratulates you, but no one knows how many times you got screwed to get there.”

Craig Tapscott: What are the biggest weaknesses that you come across most often when evaluating various opponents?

Greg Mueller: Times have definitely changed, even in these so called donkaments at the World Series of Poker. Getting ahold of chips early in the $1,500 no-limit hold’em WSOP events almost automatically meant deep runs, unless you ran into a few coolers along the way. But nowadays everybody can play really well and the mistakes are fewer, especially with all the online wizards deeper into these events.

One thing I do is to try to spot tentative players that are desperately trying to survive the early levels and thus play way too weak-tight and scared. I try to use bigger bets as a form of intimidation to take away pots. Then I use that same psychology in the opposite way to show a more observant player a good hand when betting big and expecting a call.
Another weakness I see is that people (myself included) are buried in their electronic devices way to much these days and miss all kinds of great opportunities and situations because of it.

Tilt can also play a factor. Players who are tilting start gambling more and get desperate to get big stacks and force scores and thus become vulnerable to bigger errors.
Asher Conniff:  One thing that I’ve noticed recently is how few people are actually fully paying attention during a full day of play. The amount of information available at the table just by putting down your phone and focusing on the actions of others at the table is amazing. They are missing out on the speeds at which people play, breathing patterns, sizing tells, betting tells; it really goes on forever. Anyone focusing consistently on their phone or iPad is leaving money on the table.

I actually lost my phone the day before the Borgata Spring Poker Open started, so I spent the entirety of the series (including, obviously, my wins in Event 1 and the WPT World Championship) with no phone, no iPad, no headphones, nothing. The experience was twofold: realizing how much information I was picking up, as well as how much information others were missing.

Matt Stout: I think the biggest weakness I come across in live tournaments is just a general lack of knowledge about some basic tournament fundamentals, especially when it comes to playing shallow stacks. Online tournament players tend to get a lot of practice in the strict fundamentals due to sheer volume of hands played along with the fact that online tournaments tend to play out shallower than live tournaments.

Another major mistake that live players frequently make is distracting themselves and often giving away the strength of their hand by using their phone, tablet, or laptop excessively at the table. Players often do this when they’re trying to play fewer hands and keep themselves out of pots they shouldn’t be involved in. They’d be better off doing so in a way that doesn’t draw attention to the fact that their range has often tightened considerably when they just started a particularly enthralling episode of Breaking Bad, for example. I’m sometimes guilty of this especially during NY Rangers games, but I will go out of my way to play more hands while watching games on my iPad as a reverse tell, since people will expect my range to be wider.

The biggest weakness I tend to come across in online tournaments is players who, despite a good understanding of the  fundamentals, sometimes don’t have the ability to shift gears as well as they should especially when it comes to applying the brakes to their relentless aggression. There are times when a player needs to adapt to their surroundings and table dynamics, but insists on continuing to play their same style even though it isn’t working. I’ve been guilty of this as well. Removing my ego from the game and making my adjustments based on what I think is optimal rather than stubbornly playing adhering to my typical ranges is one thing that I’ve worked hard on improving over the past few years of my career. ♠

Greg Mueller has won two WSOP bracelets and made 13 WSOP final tables. He is an ex-professional hockey player who loves life. Greg is also one of the owners and sponsored players for 3-Bet Clothing company. He can be reached on Twitter @gregfbt.

Asher Conniff won the 2015 WPT World Poker Tour Championship. Just two weeks earlier, he also won the $500 buy-in of the Borgata Spring Poker Open. Conniff has more than $1.3 million in live career tournament cashes.

Matt Stout is a 30 year old pro poker player from Bayonne, NJ who now lives in Vegas. He has accumulated more than $6 million in live and online career cashes. Matt offers private coaching and blogs at www.stoutpoker.com.