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 why play tournaments?
Ask any good poker player about tournaments, and he'll probably laugh at you and tell you what a waste of time they are. Cash players tend to think tournaments are boring, time-consuming, too dependent on luck, and worst of all, they don't help you get better at poker as fast as you could if you played cash games. All of that is true, to a point. But even with all the negative, there's one big positive: they offer you the chance to play against horrible opposition for a lot of money. Any cash game played for a comparable amount of money is going to be much, much tougher to beat. I want to argue that for many players, tournaments are actually the most profitable use of your time, sometimes by a lot.
This post is about why you should play tournaments, but some people shouldn't. The biggest problem with tournaments is the amount of short-term luck. In any given tournament, half the prize pool goes to the top three finishers. If 500 people enter, even a very good player is only going to make the top three about 1% of the time. It's normal for good players to play hundreds of tournaments without a big score, or to play over 1000 tournaments and be down money at the end. As a result, you need a much bigger bankroll for tournaments than for cash games. The commonly-used 100 buyin rule is fine for small fields with a couple hundred players, but if you play mostly huge tournaments with close to 1000 players or more, you should follow a 200 buyin rule.
If you are a newer player with a small bankroll and you're still moving up as fast as your bankroll allows you to, don't play tournaments. For example, someone with a 4K bankroll can play .5-1 NL cash games, or tournaments with a buyin of $33 and below. Let's suppose this player can beat .5-1 for 3 BB/100 playing eight tables at a time, and that he has a 50% ROI in tournaments. These assumptions are probably too optimistic for newer players, but we'll get to that later. Eight cash tables is about 600 hands per hour, so this player stands to make $36 per hour. Unfortunately, it's much more difficult to maintain eight tournaments at a time for an entire session. At the beginning of a session, you'll only be playing one or two as you wait for new ones to start, and toward the end, you'll also only be playing one or two because you can no longer commit the time to play an entire tournament from start to finish. So let's say this player manages to play 20 tournaments during an eight-hour session, with an average buyin of $25. With a 50% ROI, he expects to make $250 during the session, or $31 per hour. Even though the money is about the same, it's clearly more desirable for this player to play cash games. He's earning his money far more consistently, he's probably improving his game more rapidly, and he can begin and end his sessions whenever he wants. When you start a tournament session, you need to commit yourself to playing for the next six hours, and at times it can feel like a prison sentence.
So why shouldn't we all just play cash games and leave tournaments to the fish? Well, if you keep moving up every time you accumulate 40 buyins for the next level of cash games, you'll eventually discover that you're not beating the games for 3 BB/100 anymore. You may even be losing money. High-stakes cash games are very difficult, and most people simply don't have the ability to win. The Peter Principle applies here; people stop moving up as soon as they reach a level that they can't beat
For our next example, a player has built a 20K bankroll at 1-2 NL, but every time he's tried to move up to 2-4 NL, he's failed. He's not a good enough poker player to beat the 2-4 games for a significant winrate, and he realizes that, so he decides to remain at 1-2 even though he's overrolled for it. This player can beat 1-2 for 2.5 BB/100 playing ten tables, for $75 an hour. If he instead plays an average of three tournaments an hour with a a $100 buyin, his ROI doesn't even need to be that high before he's making a lot more money, because the opposition is so weak. Even though he's outclassed at 2-4, he dominates any online tournament he enters. If you are an experienced poker player with a solid bankroll but the cash games at your level are too difficult for you, then you could make more money if you learned basic tournament strategy and played a few tournaments a session.
Of course, on any day except Sunday, there aren't enough $100+ buyin tournaments a night for you to play them exclusively. So just play as many as you can, and if you have room for extra tables, then add cash game tables to fill the extra space. You're likely to be making more money per hour at the tournament table than at the cash game table. For example, you can play the nightly $162 tournaments on PokerStars and Full Tilt, a $33 rebuy, and three of the $109 tournaments that run every few hours, and as you bust out, replace that table with a table of 1-2 NL.
It's common for new players to try tournaments, then switch to cash games as they get more serious about poker. I argue that it should be the other way around; you should use cash games to build your bankroll and learn the game, and once you've done that, then add in some tournaments to maximize your profitability. If you're a recreational player then play whatever form of poker you enjoy the most. On the other hand, if poker is a significant source of income for you then you should look at the game as an investment and play the form of poker where you make the most money. Even if you think tournaments are kind of dumb – and I agree, they are – it's silly to pass up on the money that's out there.
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Originally Posted by Sprayed
