Poker Tournament Strategy and Just Paying Attention

Tournament Strategy and Just Paying Attention

I played a few poker tournaments over the weekend, and in evaluating my play post-session, I realized something. I’m convinced that some problems that I’ve blamed on a failure to “shift gears” during a poker tournament are actually a deeper problem.

After one hand that I played particularly poorly, I realized that I simply hadn’t planned the hand well. I’ve caught myself doing this at other times, and usually berated myself sufficiently. Then I started thinking about it with respect to poker tournaments I’ve blown in the past that I had blamed on not “shifting gears” as the tournament progressed. In fact, it has nothing to do with tournament strategy or a failure to shift gears. It has to do with a failure to play the individual hands properly.

For instance, one particular thing I’ve had a tendency to do is see a lot of flops early in poker tournaments. I like to look for opportunities to double up early by playing a lot of suited connectors up to two-gappers, unsuited connectors, baby pairs, etc. I’ll even play them out of position frequently. When I have a $2,000 stack and it cost $30, or even $90 to play, why not?

But frequently I get myself in trouble when I haven’t doubled up. Instead my stack has slowly dwindled to $1,500 or so and the blinds have gotten up to $100. The next thing I know, I’ve called one big blind or even one raise too many and I’m short stacked. The problem isn’t that I don’t slow down. The problem is that I shouldn’t have to.

Here’s what I mean. There is NO SUCH THING as “early tournament strategy”. What many players call “strategy” is just laziness. I should be evaluating the playability of each hand individually. It happens that if you do play them individually, then I should probably play most of the hands I’m already playing early, and not play the ones I’m playing when I get into trouble. But if I weren’t taking the lazy approach and viewing it in generalizations like “early tournament strategy” instead of taking the hands individually, I wouldn’t fail to recognize that I shouldn’t be playing them.

In other words, when you play deep stack no-limit hold’em, whether it be early in a poker tournament or in a cash game, you tend to want to see a lot of flops. You have to see flops to make big hands, and you’re usually looking to play big pot hands such as connectors. When you’re short stacked, whether it be in a poker tournament or a side game, you don’t need to play big pot hands. You don’t have enough behind to stack anyone anyway. You look for hands you can take to a showdown. That usually means big cards.

Interestingly, I don’t seem to have this problem when a tournament gets into middle stages. If I’m still around, by the middle stages I’ve generally started paying attention and am playing poker the way I should (although, by then a whole new set of problems crop up). I guess the fix for this is easy enough; just smack myself in the back of the head a few times prior to starting the tournament to make sure I’m awake and paying attention.

I noticed another funny thing while reading a couple of truly bad articles on tournament strategy online this weekend. Both had somewhat lengthy discussions of “gap theory” as discussed in David Sklansky's classic Tournament Poker for Advanced Players. Gap theory simply says you need a better hand to call a raise than you need to make the same raise yourself. Although Sklansky first wrote about this idea in a tournament book, it is by no stretch purely a tournament phenomenon. The funny thing was that both of these horrible articles discussed it as a phenomenon that makes tournament poker different from cash games. Ugh.