The following article was written by 2+2er MLG. Henderson121 plagiarized the article and was banned as a result. The link to the original article is:

http://archiveserver.twoplustwo.com/ubb ... d/1#import


I won a tournament a few weeks back and it got me thinking more and more about some general tournament thoughts. I was lucky enough to make a couple of big hands early, doubled-up with a big draw against top set and have a pretty big stack as the starting 800 shrank down to the 63 pay out. With 8 tables, as the blinds got higher, I realized how nearing the bubble in the tournament cards are truly of very minor importance.

At some point in a tournament the actions you should take become determined by a lot of factors, stack depth, relative stack size, position, who the blinds are, pay-out considerations, and a bunch of other things. People like to talk about how tournaments are different from cash games, and they are. Everybody gets it wrong in assuming that they are different at the beginning, they aren't. Tournaments and cash games are the same at the beginning.

At the beginning of a tournament gambling is a must, there's no way to avoid it. You need to get lucky and build a stack. Sometimes that luck will come in the form of making the nuts against the second nuts, sometimes the luck is getting the fish at the tables chips before somebody else does, sometimes that luck comes in the form of winning a coinflip. Make no mistake though, building that stack involves luck and gambling.

However, at some point, and I don't know where (and am not sure anyone really does), the emphasis changes. It becomes extremely important not to win big pots, but to win a high percentage of the pots you play. Limping becoms rare and stealing and restealing are prominent. People talk about survival in tournaments, but they missapply it. Survival is not important at the beginning, its important later on. This is the time to structure your betting for maximum folding equity, to use the stop n go, to maybe pass on a close edge. This is when extreme aggression must be applied. If your stack is getting short you'll need to take a gamble, because quite frankly its easier to win the 40 side of a 40/60 when you have 10BBs then it is to build a 5BB stack up to 20. If your stack is healthy you must add to your stack while protecting your chips. That means using your leverage to use fewer chips to make other players make decisions for their whole stack. When you have chips, even though you must protect them, you cannot be afraid to use them. Sitting on your chips is the fastest way to destroy any chance you have at a high finish. Notice how few of these tactics actually involve the cards in front of you.

So, when does it change. When do cash game considerations fall by the wayside. I have no idea, and I'm not sure anybody else does either. To some degree it depends on stack depth. When stacks are shallow obviously these factors are more important. However, a 20BB stack plays a lot differently when the average stack at your table is 60 than when the average stack at your table is 10. To some degree it has to do with the money. When you are on the bubble obviously factors other than the cards become more important. However, in many tournaments (especially online) the inflection point occurs well before the money. I suppose it might be possible for somebody better at math than I am to figure out an equation having to do with average stack depth (both in the tournament and at a given table) that would begin to answer some of these questions, but I'm not convinced these questions can be answered mathematically. Ultimately to me it means that tournament poker is its own brand of poker separate from any poker type, but played using those other types. Consequently tournament concepts continually get misunderstood through the lense of these other game types.

Good post Henderson, but you're contradicting yourself in one point.

Early MTT = Cash games you say, but then you say "at the beginning of a tournament gambling is a must, ..."

Cash games is making +ev decisions, it's not gambling and certainly not taking coinflips.

General online tournaments do not have depth to them. Sure tournaments like the sunday million and wcoop events and what not have 30 min blind levels with 10k stacks give you more room to play and thus you can avoid coinflips early. I still think you should be looking to see cheap flops with suited aces (as long as you can throw it away if all you hit is top pair) and suited connectors to try and stack people. The early stages of tournaments are filled wtih dead money and morons who cannot fold TP so why should you not be in there trying to take their chips.

Wow... that was low. Instead of just pasting the content, he changed like a dozen words to make it seem his own.

Henderson is banned.