Shock and Awe

The title of this post is pretty much how I feel after witnessing the cesspool of idiocy that is online tournament poker. Tournaments are where decent poker goes to curl up into a ball and die, while a whole parade of stupid comes and has a party at its funeral.

My last post was about how even at lower stakes cash games, the game has gotten much tougher, with even the donks tightening up or at least playing more aggressively. After playing through a bunch of tournaments over the past few days in preperation for playing my Step 6 ticket on Stars, I can safely say that the same is not true in tournaments.

Somehow I managed to barely eke out a win in the ~100 tourneys I played, finishing with a 4.2% ROI. I could regale you with all the ridiculous bad beat stories, etc., but I think I'll just spare you. The question remains...why is play in tournaments so terrible compared to cash games? Shouldn't the better players move to tourneys from cash if the play there is so much worse? Well, here's my list of reasons why that hasn't happened:

1) For a given difference in skill, the difference in expected earnings is larger in cash games than in tourneys. This is the biggest reason. It's mainly due to i) the fact that most tourneys get short-stacked pretty fast, which decreases the number of decisions in a hand, and therefore the advantage to those who can make better decisions. Cash games are usually deeper, so this isn't a problem. ii) The fact that the expected winnings function is concave in chip totals, which means that (good players, at least) should try to play more conservatively and keep the pot small early on. Bad players can very easily combat that in a no limit tournament by going all-in early and often. In cash games this isn't the case, since chips are money, so winnings are obviously linear in chips.

2) The rake is higher in tournaments. In cash games, rake is 5% of the pot up to $3. At .25/.50, I think this comes out to a little less than 3%, on average. In tournaments, if you buy into a $10 tourney, you'll pay $1 in rake. Even for a $69 tourney you'll pay $6 in rake. So if your expected earnings are equal in cash and tourneys before taking rake into account, then you'll be better off sticking to cash games.

3) Variance is higher for tourney players. Of course cash players have gross downswings (and I am no stranger to them), but in general cash players have less variance than tournament players, especially those playing in big tournaments with large fields. I think this high variance is part of what brings the donkeys out that like to gamble, paying a $10 for some infintesimal (for them at least) chance at a big prize, but for serious players variance is a bad thing.

4) Tournament play is boring. This is more my opinion...but with the shallow stacks and the large population of retards that are infesting your tables, the decisions just aren't as interesting. Now there are all these simulators and wizards or whatever that just tell you whether you're supposed to shove or not pre-flop. To me post-flop play is a lot more fun. Also, to me tournaments are more frustrating because i) you almost always lose at some point, and ii) when you lose, you can't rebuy and start right back up pwning the same donkeys. You have to go start some new tourney with new donkeys, meanwhile the donkeys that lucksacked into your stack get to keep on donking along in the old tournament, probably thinking how hard they pwnd you when they limp/called 1/3 of their stack with 52s and fropped a frush or some other such nonsense.

Anyway, just my 2 cents. If you're some tournament player that's really offended by my assessment...well, come and play some cash games and see what you think.

One more thing: If you're on the lookout for my first CardRunners video, I'm told it will be up on Monday, June 15th, with the author bruechips919, which is my CardRunners member ID.

-BRUECHIPS