Different Games, Different Expectations
Playing multi-table tournaments takes a split disposition, a mental duality on the topics of winning and expectation. Many talented players focus on tournaments because of the prevalence of terrible opponents who try what they’ve seen on TV or heard friends talk about. Any time you’re at the table with players worse than you, there’s positive value and expectation. You are, unquestionably, more likely to make more money than most other people in the game.
And yet, you’ll lose money the vast majority of sessions you play. There’s the 80+% of the time where you finish out-of-the-money in a tournament…and the other times where you go out in the first handful of levels and end up with a small return on your buy-in. The feeling of going out in 19th in a huge-field tournament is worse than missing the money altogether. You come so close, and yet so far. With one small cash in a normal MTT session, you don’t even make back your other buy-ins…trust me, I consider those “losses” just as much as going out in the first hour.
That was how I thought about poker for the three years or so I played multi-table tournaments almost exclusively. Long losing stretches are part of the game, and if you want to succeed, you learn to get used to it…if not like it, in some masochistic way. Part of the reason winning a tournament feels so good is because it happens so infrequently. To paraphrase Eddie Murphy, if you’re starving, a cracker will be the most delicious thing you ever ate. I hold big MTT scores as dear as many other important events in my life, because of all the failures necessary to reach that point.
Starting in the last two weeks of last year, I decided to focus on cash games for the first time since I found out what a poker tournament was. I’ve known for years cash games – where I can come and go where I please and have some control over who my opponents are – would fit my life better. In tournaments, I’m a slave to the starting time and can’t stop until I’m eliminated. With multi-table SNGs, you might wait around for an extended period of time before starting. Ask anyone who has been the 6th person to register for a $10+1 90-man or $20+2 180-man on PokerStars.
Only one problem with my cash game plan blocked me from trying it years ago: I lost money in them. Like many tournament players, my strongest skills are inapplicable to cash games, and my weaknesses are mandatory for success. My judgment on being “pot committed” gets worse and worse the deeper-stacked I am. A strong hand for a 40 BB stack may be a disaster with 200 BB. I also play looser when I’m deep-stacked, which means I’m playing more hands from out-of-position.
Being aware of these leaks is the first step to fixing them and being a profitable cash game player. I’ve chosen to start with PLO8, a game where I believe I have more of an edge at my buy-in than NLHE. It doesn’t hurt I’ve run well over my first three weeks…over my first 10,000 hands, I won about 12 BB/hr.
At the start of my journey, I’ve found a couple of issues I believe have to be fixed if I am to become a solid winner on the cash game grind. I’ve discovered what it feels like to expect to win every time I play…doesn’t sound like a bad thing, but it could be. About a week into my grind, I had a stretch of eight consecutive winning sessions, several of them being a buy-in or more. I haven’t booked that many consecutive wins since building my first bankroll playing single-table SNGs seven years ago (and maybe not even then). I knew I was not only playing well, getting value out of my made hands and getting away from dangerous spots before they built into out-of-control pots. But I was also getting lucky in a few key hands, catching gutshot river cards to freeroll low hands into outright scoops.
And yet, my Phil Hellmuth shades were on. I thought I was awesome, deserving of every break coming my way. So when I ended up down in each of the next three sessions, I was frustrated. No, scratch that – I was PISSED. Why? Because I made a couple mistakes and wasn’t the luckbox I had been the previous few days? I’d never be that emotionally fragile about a few bad tournaments. I shouldn’t do it for cash games either.
I also have an annoying habit of regularly totaling up how much cash I have at my open tables and determining whether I’m up or down for the session, and by how much. It’s irrelevant, and quite possibly dangerously distracting. Playing MTTs, I habitually check on tournament lobbies every few minutes, to get a feel for where I stand in relation to chip averages, and seeing when the blinds are going up again. In cash games, I’m feeding the same habit, going out of my way to make a similar “situational sweep”…only the data I’m collecting doesn’t matter.
All that matters in a cash game is playing well, thinking clearly, and understanding if I have a skill edge over my opponents. Whether I’m profitably ahead or behind brings unnecessary data into the equation. If I’m winning, there’s a temptation to leave the table to maintain my win, or loosen up and change my game because I’m playing with “free money.” If I’m losing, I’m more likely to gamble to try and get back to even…ask any sports bettor how well THAT strategy works.
I’m far more likely to book either a small- to medium-sized win or a big loss playing cash games. Changing my expectations should help reverse those two outcomes. What you think you should be getting out of the games you play depends on what game it is, and the player you are capable of being.
Paul “grapsfan” Herzog has been a PocketFives.com Contributing Writer since 2005, and is a successful part-time low stakes poker player. He can often be found playing online when he has free time away from his duties as a Software Testing Engineer for a Minnesota firm.
Aside from being the most viewed Contributing Writer in PocketFives history (over 100 front page articles since 2005), Paul is a volunteer senior forum moderator in Poker Discussion and is in charge of guiding content in our Hand Advice forum, which has a small yet loyal readership. He also serves as a community editor for the PocketFives front page, specializing in member-submitted articles.
