In a cash game, going all-in on a coin-flip may carry a marginal EV+, but that is no longer the case in a tournament. You've met tournament failure.ĭue to this fact, the odds associated with all-ins suffer a modification in tournament poker. When you lose your last chip, your tournament life is over: your buy-in is lost and there's nothing in the world you can do to recover it. As it gets shorter and shorter, your options grow fewer and fewer too.

In tournaments, besides being a weapon and a tool that will make it possible for you to amass more chips, your stack is also your life-blood. It is not directly connected to your survival at the table (if you get felted, you can always re-deposit and get rolling again). In cash game poker, your stack is a mere weapon.

This is the concept from which most of the differences between cash games and tournaments stem. I'm not trying to overstate the obvious here, but the first thing you need to get used to in tournament poker is that your stack is finite. While they're played by the same rules and with the exact same 52-card deck, cash games and tournaments can be very different in places. If you're primarily an online cash game player, but thinking about playing more tournaments, be careful though: the fact that you're good at cash games doesn't guarantee that you'll be equally successful in tournaments. I use the word lucky in tournaments because the luck element in tournaments is definitely far greater due to the increasing blind levels, so players are much more likely to make mistakes, and in big MTTs, that means you will have to get lucky, win lots of coin flips in order to run deep in the vent and outlast a really large field. This is what brings most tourney players to the tables, and one big score can really set you up for the year or if you are exceptionally lucky perhaps even for life (like in the case of winning the WSOP ME). On the other hand, when you are playing in tournaments (and I'm talking about high buy-in Guaranteed prize-pool MTTs here, available at every online poker room on a weekly/monthly basis) your initial investment is infinitely smaller than your potential winnings. If you're a solid winning cash player the rewards can be huge but so can the variance and swings in your roll. Sure, cash games can be extremely profitable, especially at mid to higher stakes levels, but the only problem is that each and every dollar that you win requires an almost same size investment on your part. If you're a successful cash game player, you've probably already contemplated making the move to tournaments online.

Texas holdem cash games online