Tournament Poker Poker Forums

I currently play 14-21 tables of small stakes NLHE and PLO and make quite a decent hourly, a lot coming from a good RB deal. I started playing PLO a month or two ago. My mind was blown by how much worse PLO players are on average than NLHE, and that if I table select well between those two games I would be able to make a lot of money.

I feel like the key to making money in poker is finding games where you have a big edge, which becomes much easier the more games you can play. So I feel like I should learn how to play tournies since those seem to be fish favorites. However, my understanding is that your edge in a tournament is generally much smaller than 100bb+ cashgames.

Soo..

a.) Do you think it would be worth my time to learn tournaments? If so what are some good books / vids for someone like me?
b.) What stakes / games should I start playing? How should I tell if I'm ready to move up stakes? I have decent BR.
c.) Is mixing tournament grinding with cash games easy?

d.) How do you pick which tournaments you are going to play? Do you just open up the lobby and mark the big tournies on your calender for MTTs and just play 1 while playing cash on side. For SNG's do you just register for however many you feel you can play because there are always fish in tournies, or do you table select somehow for SNGs?

Thanks for reading my wall of questions. =)

a) They are definitely profitable, but are very high variance. If not cashing for 50, 100, even more, tournaments in a row bother you, then it probably isn't the game for you.
b) I'm mostly a cash game player who plays the occasional tournament, but I hear that 100-200 buyins is a standard bankroll for a tournament grinder. Someone else can confirm or deny this. If you are only grinding part time, and play mostly cash, your bankroll needs will be less.
c) My advice is not to do it, at least not at the same time. You might as well play a table of NL cash, with a table of Stud/8, and a table of PLO at the same time. You'll probably have just as easy of a time if you do that then if you try to play NL cash and NL tournament in the same session. You need to be in the correct mindset if you want to play a tournament, which you won't be able to do if you are playing cash at the same time.

+1

I would suggest doing Sit n Goes before tournaments, as these usually will be good preparation for tournaments. And will act as a small taste of tournaments. Going straight from cash games to tournaments is probably rather difficult. For me I play SNGs and Tourneys and hardly any cash.

Good luck.

A) It depends on you. If you want to be able to grind a tournament Sunday every now and then or want to hit up Vegas for the WSOP some summer, yep, learn tournament poker. It's a little dated, but I'd still say Harrington on Holdem is a very good tournament poker primer if you have 0 tournament experience.

B) If you're a fairly successful cash game player with a solid bankroll I'd just dip into tournaments slowly. Play a few Sundays kind of thing. If that's the case then you don't need the 100-200 buy ins. Which isn't full buy ins, by the way. It's actually average buy in. So let's say you play the Million, the Lotto, and whatever the 55 is called. You've got 276(ish) in buy ins over 3 tournaments, so you're just under $100 in average buy in. If you're rolled for that, you can play that schedule, even though one tournament has a 20x bigger buy in than another one.
As for what stakes you should play, I'd start with playing Sundays anything under $20 and add in the $55 (Assumes Stars, whatever site you play probably has something similar on Sundays).

C) I wouldn't try to grind cash and tournaments at the same time. If you're running low on tables add another tournament.

D) As I've mentioned, I'd start with a Sunday schedule. I'd plan to reg for things for about 2-3 hours and then play until I busted everything. If I'm running low on tables and want more I'd add in some 180 man SnGs. I wouldn't play 9 man SnGs in your position. The ROIs on them are pretty thin and you're going to hit a much worse reg:fish ratio. For SnGs I'd go with at least 45 man, but 180 would be better.

Hope this helps!

a.) Do you think it would be worth my time to learn tournaments? If so what are some good books / vids for someone like me?
b.) What stakes / games should I start playing? How should I tell if I'm ready to move up stakes? I have decent BR.
c.) Is mixing tournament grinding with cash games easy?

a) People can make money from grinding tournamnets, so if you want to then just try it out but do watch out for variance (or rather downswings) I haven't been that impressed with many books on tournies but the vids on this site are good - it's too hard to single out any in particular.
b) I would recommend trying some single table SnGs to get some feel for some icm and also stack bubble leverage. SnGWizard is extremely useful for these and also in the larger field games at the push/fold stages, it does take a bit to get used to how to use this tool well. Single table ie, STTs are relatively low variance and as tournie heavy variance takes some getting used to it might be reasonable to start playing some of these (or 18s /45s). I would avoid big field ones early unless you are comfortable with very large downswings. For this same reason I would start at low stakes - the quality of play these days is pretty high in them and you can learn the ropes cheaply.
(If you play 180s with a true 5% roi there is a 50% chance of seeing a downswing of 280+BIs within 5000 games played - truely brutal - if grinding 180s or big MTTs it is usually better to stay in a stake level where you have quite an edge in order to protect from the downswings - it is the downswings not the variance that hurts, the variance is about the same for 5%, 10% or 20% rois but the chances of downswings is far lower with a high roi.)

c) Not for me but I guess that you can learn to do it well.

THx for those good replies. If that 50% of 280BI downswing is accurate, that's insane. I guess eventually playing some WSOPs might be cool. When I very first started playing poker I read Harrington on Holdem and play $5.50's on FTP, so I have loose idea whats going on.

I would like to add that on euro sites there are a lot of tournaments with overlay quite often which is great value for tournament grinders (and cash game players who dabble occasionally into tournaments) if you feel like grinding mtts just open up several sites, have a few buy-ins at a lot of different site and if you see a good overlay, hop on and enjoy the enormous value of those tournaments

THx for those good replies. If that 50% of 280BI downswing is accurate, that's insane.

Yep, I'm pretty sure it's true. The typically grinder at 180's probably has a better roi than 5%, I suspect 20% is more normal and at this level you are likely to see a 180+BI downswing (49% of the time) somewhere in a 5000 game group. You can't really get an accurate estimate of roi especially at big fields and this will vary with time anyway but this does show that you should prepare yourself for a deep bad run. On the plus side you do get as many heaters but these don't seem to quite psychologically compensate for the downswings.
Don't let me put you off these though as the 180s do often have quite weak fields and higher roi's are very possible, they are also good in that they are reasonably easy to multitable as you don't find yourself HU on several of them that often . I am just trying to say be careful and if bad runs do affect your play you need to be exra careful to take some time to develop some swing self-control.

If you want to grind tournaments its important to train correctly. If you evaluate yourself based on results you won't be grinding tournaments very long. Its best to form a team of players and evaluate hand histories of your entire team. Successful cash game players usually don't like tournaments because you can play ten hours of solid poker in a tournament get bad beat and leave with nothing. It truely is a grind at times. I'm a solid cash game player, but for some sick reason I like tournaments more. There is no better feeling than winning a large field tournament. If you really are just looking to maximize your profit than I would suggest focusing on one area and becoming as specialized as possible.

The best book you can read on tournaments is Skalanksy's Tournament Poker for Advanced Players. I went from never winning a tournament multi table wise, to $1,100 3rd place the night I finished the book in a $10 rebuy. This TREND continued as evidenced on my profile. http://www.pocketfives.com/profiles/bruceleeboy/ I offer coaching for tournaments for a price relative to your buyin as will be the coaching concepts. Tournaments are game theory and Cash is Conditional Probability. Like Yin/Yang. Sit and Go's are good to start with but they will lack the deep stack portion of the game that is very important. Good Luck and again, if you'd like lessons let me know. Run Good and Play Great!

I would recommend watching all of IWEARGOGGLES videos on deuces .He is a great mtt player (LukeFromB13 on stars).Also jjyykk has a new mtt series called "mid-stakes enforcer" which was really beneficial to me.If you were interested in forking out a few bucks a month, then pocket 5s training has some of the best mtt videos out there ...

Honestly I am learning all the games again, and I really believe that I need some different types of games to play to make me feel more all around player. Also, I like watching OMGCLAYDOL for the bigger MTT's but I think Dc needs more recent Mtt videos or maybe I'm not looking hard enough. Good luck on the tables.

are SNGs completely dry in the US now? it seems that everyone knows the moves and plays now. I think you can have an edge in HU SNGs though

are SNGs completely dry in the US now? it seems that everyone knows the moves and plays now. I think you can have an edge in HU SNGs though

i think all poker should be beatable assuming you work hard enough at it and can put enough volume in. i think it is more a question of work ethic