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Tournaments
Tournaments Overview
Tournament poker is one of the world's hottest fads. While
poker has been consistently played for over 100 years, the tournament circuit is
still a relatively new thing. In 1972, the grand prize at the World Series of
Poker (a $10k buyin) was only $80,000. In 2003, Chris Moneymaker took home a
cool $2.5 million. Prizes have soared to over $7 Million for first place! The reason for this drastic increase in prize money is the
number of players that have entered tournaments. In 1972, only 8 players entered
the world series of poker, while 839 entered in 2003 and 5,619 entered in
2005.
Television has made
tournament poker look glamorous- a competition where skill prevails. However,
the truth of the matter is that luck plays a much larger factor in tournaments
than ring games. The best players in the world may never win a huge tourney. Think about it this way: if you started with $2000, what is the
chance that you would end up with $2 million dollars before the night was over
at a regular no-limit game where the blinds were not regularly raised? Zero. However, to win a tournament where each player
has 2k starting chips and 1000 people enter, you would need to win two million
in chips to win the tournament. Not an easy feat to do unless lady luck truly
smiled upon you that day!
Nevertheless, I play tournaments because they are fun and
because I hope to make some money at them. Winning at tournaments still requires
sound poker strategy, but emphasizes several factors more so than ring games:
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Your chips have a different relative value. In a
standard poker game, you should view each dollar as having equal value. This
is not the case in a tournament. When you start off with an initial thousand
in chips, that thousand is worth a lot more than the next thousand you make.
Since you cannot buy back in, you always need to have chips in order to
survive. At the beginning of the tournament, you should be more reticent to
go all in because even if you win you are not in much better of a position.
However, later in the tournament you must gamble or else you risk just
losing by being blinded away.
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Domination plays a much bigger factor. Later in the
tournament, the blinds will be so high that most players in contested hands
will be all-in preflop. Thus, you want hands that dominate other hands. High
pocket pairs are good because they dominate lower pocket pairs, and ace with
a good kicker is a good hand because it dominates many other hands. Many
players make the mistake of betting very hard with a low pocket pair such as
55. In truth, these low pockets are only good for stealing blinds. If
someone calls you, you are at best a 50-50, while you are a 4.5:1 underdog
if they have a higher pocket pair.
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