Posted in Poker October 19th, 2008
Winning Big Money In Poker Tournaments Means You Need to Make Small Wins First.
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Is there any joy in getting eliminated from a poker tournament? Well if you actually made the money, then yes you can take solice in the fact that you played it right? Now surely you understand that by now that poker may appear simple at first - but is anything but. And tournament strategy requires advanced strategizing for long term success and profitability.
One of the most important factors when calculating poker tournament strategy is making the money. For some players, this isn’t actually that important as their bankroll is at a level of comfort having 50, 100 and even 200 buy-ins or more, waiting in their account for the next tournament. A lot of rounders and pros will play more aggressively in this situation because they want to make the money with a healthy stack.
For most online players though, this simply isn’t the case and making the money should be of paramount importance. The reason for this is because when you are actually building a bankroll, the best money to play with is that of your opponents, not your own. This is called OPM, or Other Players’ Money, and if you are just starting out in online poker, then OPM is your only way to long term profitability, unless you want to rely on luck.
The only way to start using OPM is to do your utmost to make the money in every tournament you play. It is true you may sacrifice a bigger payout, but when starting out it makes sense to tighten up for a few critical reasons. The first thing is that your competition is generally so weak, that their play will vault you to the money without risking a lot of your stack.
Also, you would be surprised to know how fast the tournament field cuts down as a result of inexperienced play of opponents. This in fact values your tournament fee higher than what you really spent on it.
Lastly, you can count on making the money about 15 to 20 percent of the time, and no matter how you play, the math is on your side that you will make the final table often enough to earn those higher payouts, no matter how tight you play.
Now adopting this philosophy normally requires tight-aggressive Harrington style play, but it’s not so easy to stick to that style while witnessing the foolish players around you and their lucky, but growing stacks. Getting caught up in that though, means you are playing on your lack of emotional control, and not using a solid winning strategy.
Realistically, this is all going to be determined by the pure math of poker and your belief in exactly that. If you play tight aggressive, you will make the money often enough to build your OPM bankroll, and then play risk free forever more. Now, what do you really think is more profitable?
Marty Smith has video reviews of all the online poker software so you can see them being used before you decide which one is right for you. He also has a winning poker tournaments video series that is free poker training just for signing up.
This entry was posted on Sunday, October 19th, 2008 at 8:23 pm and is filed under Poker. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.