Plenty has been written about the drawbacks of simply cashing in poker tournaments. Anyone who spends time on PocketFives or other poker forums, reads books about tournament strategy, listens to interviews of great players, etc., has heard the truth. In large-field MTTs, you can make more in one deep run than you would min-cashing dozens of times in a row.Concentrating on an In The Money (ITM) percentage is a fool’s strategy…but you can be in a worse place than limping into the money. In the words of my hero, Bill Nye – consider the following….
A friend went far in a recent Deep Stacks tournament on PokerStars. He played for over 10 hours and made the final three tables of a 1,200-person field. For his efforts, he made a bit more than four times (4x) his money back, or approximately $3.50 an hour. Avoiding the min-cash made him another $20 over three hours – still less than minimum wage. If he would have lasted to the final table bubble, he would have more than doubled his money, a rate of over $50 per for that last hour, as opposed to the $6.50/hour he made for the previous three.
Obviously, the last few places are the only place where you make serious money for your buy-in, but there is a dramatic shift in value starting around 12th in most MTT payout structures. The money “dead zone” goes much deeper than just the first payout level or two. You can easily avoid min-cashes, but not change gears at the right time to reach a place where playing the tournament is financially worth your valuable time. To take full advantage of the times you play and run well, you have to give yourself the best chance to make it out of the dead zone and to short-handed two-table play, if not the final table.
The worst place to be in a tournament is busting right before you earn more than the kid who works at Subway. How to get fully out of the dead zone and pocket what you deserve is the crux of the problem.
The issue at hand is twofold. First is a matter of fear. Busting out of a tournament sucks, at any time, but especially when you’re so close to the promised land. When you’re deep, there has been a commitment of time and emotional energy. You will naturally be overprotective of your “tournament life,” and be afraid of busting and letting this opportunity go to waste. Don’t be. Fear will cause you to tighten up, miss spots to bluff people and steal pots.
Spewing off chips in a misguided attempt to run over the table is never a good thing. But if the correct play is to 4-barrel someone light…or put a very tight player to the test when you barely have fold equity…or call off on the bottom end of your range because you’re getting the right price against his entire range…then you should make the correct play. The number of players left is irrelevant. If you’re not willing to play poker, you’re sitting around waiting for cards.
There is no more of a reason to fear busting for 4x your buy-in with three tables left, than there is busting on the money bubble and not min-cashing. Either way, you didn’t make enough to celebrate, so what’s the difference?
The second issue we face as the number of tables dwindles down is recognizing the need to shift gears at all. As previously stated, we all know about the need to ramp up your play, pick up chips on the bubble, and be willing to risk elimination rather than hanging on to double your money (or less) with a min-cash. Once the bubble breaks, and the initial bunch of super-short hangers-on are eliminated, the tendency is to heave a sigh of relief. Relax, catch your breath, and tighten up.
Tightening up here is wrong. The game hasn’t stopped. The need to stay ahead of the blinds and maintain a stack large enough to apply pressure is still there. Stagnating for a level or two while the blinds increase will turn an above-average stack into a push/fold one in a hurry. The game is passing you buy while you congratulate yourself on successfully abusing the bubble and building up some chips.
If everyone else is tight, the correct adjustment is to be loose. With small, persistent raises, you don’t have to be successful all very often for your aggression to pay off (less than 50% of the time). If the table isn’t folding as much as you’d like, slow down on the opening blind-stealing raises, and focus more on finding 3-bet spots. However you do it, you must remain active, and an obvious threat to the rest of the table.
The key is to always maintain your edge. In talking about the Deep Stacks tournament, my friend said, “You can get hypnotized into folding forever. The structure is so slow that you don’t feel punished by doing nothing but waiting for premium hands.” Instead, think of a structure so good you can afford to take shots at big bluffs and loose calls, and still have time to recover if you lose.
We’ve all been trained in this two –level period – the “bubble” – where shifting gears and being willing to risk everything is critical to tournament success. And it is. But if only 12-15 out of the 200 places cashing really pay out anything worthwhile, the phrase “bubble” does not truly reflect the task at hand. Bubbles are short. The post-cash levels in a huge MTT are a long swamp to grind through. Pick up the pace and stay on the surface by pushing the others down into the muck. Getting bogged down is the worst place to be.
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