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Tournament Poker - No Limit vs. Limit Poker
Once you nail the basics of Texas Hold’em strategy down, you’ll realize
that the best way to build up a bankroll is through tournaments. Every
online poker room features a wide variety of tournaments these days,
and tournament tables are usually much more popular than cash tables.
Tournaments – both live and online – usually feature NL Texas Hold’em,
but Omaha, Stud Razz, and other poker variants are played too with
different structures (Limit, PL, NL etc).
In order to become
familiar with tournament strategy, you first need to learn about a few
basic concepts. The buy-in is the money you need to pay in order to
register for the tournament. Your buy-in will be included in a
prize-pool, out of which money shall be given out to those who finish
“in the money” (ITM). Together with the buy-in you’ll also pay a
tournament fee (usually around 10% of the buy-in) which goes to the
poker room as cumulated rake, since none of the hands you’ll play in
the tourney itself shall be for real money chips and thus they won’t be
raked either.
The blinds in poker tournaments go up in set
intervals. The blinds structure tells you how fast these blinds will go
up. According to how fast the online poker room increases the blinds,
tournaments can be categorized into regular, speed and turbo tourneys.
The
initial stack that you get at the beginning of the tournament
represents your tournament life. Once you run out of chips, you bust
out.
Some tournaments feature optional re-buys, through which
a player who’s been busted out can get back into the action, by paying
out a set sum again and receiving a fresh starting stack.
Tournaments
can be single table ones (STTs or SNGs) in which only a maximum of 10
players take part, or multi-table ones, in which thousands of players
play, distributed at several tables.
STTs (Single Table
Tournaments) feature a much smaller buy-in/likely winnings ratio, but
the individual odds for reaching the money are much better. MTTs have
excellent buy-in/payout ratios, but an individual is much less likely
to make it to the money.
The bigger the buy-in you have to pay
out at registration, the bigger the prize-pool will be for tournaments.
Industry leading online poker rooms organize guaranteed prize-pool
tournaments. These GTDs – as they’re also known – run on a weekly or
daily basis and the poker room provides the prize pool, regardless of
how many players sign up and how much money their buy-ins add up to. If
player buy-ins surpass the guarantee, the prize-pool will be increased.
Tournament strategy is radically different from general (cash
game) poker strategy. While the tight aggressive approach may work
wonders at low limit cash tables, tournament players need to be
extremely flexible about their playing style. In a tourney, the object
is not to squeeze money out of a fish that you’re lucky enough to have
at your table. In a tourney, you have to survive. Survive for long
enough and you may just take down the big prize, but winning money here
is not just about finishing first. You will win money as long as you
finish ITM, and in large tournaments that could mean tens of positions
off the winner.
The best possible way to sum up efficient tournament strategy is through a system that poker-master Dan Harrington has devised.
Because
of the continuously escalating blinds, the relationship between your
stack-size and the sum of the BB and the SB should dictate your
strategic approach in different moments throughout the tournament.
In
the beginning, when the blinds are small and you have more than 20 Ms
(BB+SB = M) you should play tight aggressive. You should only play
premium hands when out of position and good ones when in position. At
this stage, you can afford to play optimally. As the blinds go up and
your stack stays the same-size or it shrinks, you’ll have to adapt your
strategy to the new rigors of the environment. When you have between 10
and 20 Ms in your stack, you begin to see your options narrow. At this
stage, you need to steal blinds, you need to get something going, which
means you have to loosen up your starting hand requirements.
When
your stack falls below 10Ms, you’re beginning to feel the pressure that
larger stacks around the table subject you to. You’ll still have most
of your strategic tools available however if you do not add to your
stack fast you’ll soon relinquish your grip on them.
When your
stack falls below 5 Ms, you’re in trouble. You can’t bluff anymore, you
can’t steal blinds anymore, and thus you‘re robbed of some of your most
important tools for survival. An interesting phenomenon also occurs:
your opponents begin to gang up on you, adding extra
pressure on you
to force you out of the game.
Once your stack is below 1 M, all
you can do is wait for a reasonable hand and shove all-in. Something
like Q,9 will be a reasonable hand at this stage. What you want is to
have only one other player in the hand you commit your last tournament
breath on. Thus your odds get a boost and you give yourself a real
opportunity to pull through.
In every tournament, play
tightens up on the bubble. A savvy player can turn this into an
advantage. Beware though that the general tightness disappears as soon
as the bubble bursts. In the closing stages of a tournament (when
you’re already deep in the money) you’ll have to loosen up more and
more to keep up with the blinds. During this stage, the luck factor
becomes a major player in the equation.
If you play in online
tournaments, Texas Holdem’s NL variant is what you’ll mostly play. If
you decide to test your luck at the cash tables, or to take your online
tourney experience to the live tables, you’ll come face to face with
the Fixed Limit version.
In NL poker, the amount of money (or
tournament chips) a player can bet is unlimited. In Fixed Limit poker,
there is a set limit to how much one can bet on every street.
Some
of the strategic differences between Limit Hold’em and NL Hold’em are
obvious: in NL Hold’em you can protect a hand very efficiently, in
Limit Hold’em you’re pretty much deprived of this option. Bluffing is
much more difficult if not downright impossible in Limit Hold’em. On
low limits, everyone will pretty much call just about any starting hand
to showdown, so that means, your starting hand standards should be
tightened up seriously. In Limit Hold’em, the mistakes that you make
will never have a deadly serious consequence on your bankroll. In NL
Hold’em, one small mistake can cost you your entire bankroll that
you’ve been building up through painstaking work for months. The
important thing when you switch between NL and FL Hold’em is to get
into the right mindset that the peculiarities and inherent differences
between the two variants require.
