Poker Portal

It is often said that switching from tournament poker to poker cash games and vice versa is one of the most difficult transitions to make if you want to be successful in both forms of poker. The significance with tournament poker is that players can deceive themselves for very long periods of time that they could in fact be winning players. The variance in these large field tournaments is so huge that it can take literally hundreds of tournaments before a player really finds out the truth about their overall game.

In cash games however we are presented with somewhat of a different picture as online players and especially those who multi-table can find out in the space of a week or two if they are really cutting it in cash games. There are numerous differences between the two that are obvious and a few that are not so obvious.

The early stages of poker tournaments resemble cash games in that the blind to stack ratio is similar. This situation though doesn’t last long as just a couple of levels in and the average stack can be something like 50 big blinds. A combination of having no cards and tight play can soon render a player with a short stack in tournament poker and looking for their first available opportunity to get their stack in the middle.

To highlight a classic difference between tournament poker and cash games, take a look at the following situation. It is in the middle stages of a poker tournament and our hero holds A-K. The average stack on his table is around 25 big blinds and the blinds are 50-100. It is raised to 300 from an early position player and called by two other players. Our hero has a stack of 2500 and decides to shove all-in.

This play is basically automatic because with 25 big blinds then there really isn’t anything to think about. Now look at this situation is a deep stacked NL200 ring game where the raiser and the two callers all have at least 100 big blinds in their respective stacks. You also have $200+ in your stack, now in this situation, a re-raise doesn’t look anywhere near as appealing as the other players will not be coming in with the same types of hands that they would be in a tournament due to not being under the same amount of time pressure.

So AK in this situation doesn’t rate to be the boss hand anywhere near as often simply because in a full-ring game it will be up against hands of a similar strength or better too often.

Comments are closed.