Changing from cash game poker to tournament poker
Players who are experienced at one form of poker over another can often find it difficult to switch. I know from personal experience that whenever I switched to the odd Texas Hold em poker tournament then my mindset simply wasn’t right and my mindset was geared more on survival and less on playing an optimal tournament strategy. When you play in ring games and especially in full ring games then patience is a huge factor in the game. Full ring games are often a waiting contest until the value that is in the game makes a mistake and if you are lucky enough then you are the recipient.
You are always playing deep stacked as you can top up when your chip stack falls. But one of the biggest mental barriers for players to overcome in tournament poker is to put their tournament on the line when they can sit and wait a bit longer. Let us look at a situation here to show you what I mean. The blinds are 200-400 and you have 6000 in chips which is 15 big blinds. You open raise with K-J from the button and you make it 1200 and the big blind calls you and the pot becomes 2600 when the big blind calls. The flop comes Q-10-4 rainbow and your opponent who started the hand with 7000 in chips bets 1300 into the pot and you fold.
Folding keeps you in the tournament with a stack of 4800 which is twelve big blinds and so your stack is playable. However who is to say that you will not go card dead and the next level increase will be to 300-600 and so you can become short stacked very quickly. The key for me with regards to playing poker tournaments is to pre-empt these situations and make a move sooner rather than later. In my opinion then this was a situation lost as your opponent could be taking a cheap stab at the pot knowing that they still have 4500 if they have to fold.
If you force the fold with an all in shove on the flop then your stack increases from the original 6000 to 8700 and if you get called and win then you can double through here. What we are trying to ascertain here is why you folded on the flop. If your reason is because you have a cash game mentality then you have something of a problem. Likewise if they have a defensive safety first mindset that is more geared towards surviving than accumulating chips.
I always feel that the art of playing poker tournaments is in trying to balance two equally but very important concepts. These are surviving and also accumulating chips. Both of these factors are vital but if you do not get the balance right then players who play survival tactics to an extreme will likely blind away during the middle stages and players who are too aggressive with regards to accumulating chips will more than likely blow their chips to the first rock that they run into.