Texas Hold ‘Em Poker Tournament

Be a Sit and Go Mutual Fund Manager
By Marty Smith 

Successful online single players realize that one of the biggest hurdles to their success was to learn how to properly manage their bankroll, while at the same time building their skills. It’s an often hard lesson to learn and for most of us tested our resolve time and time again, until really understanding and role management sunk in deeply enough to have an impact on our game.

But managing a bankroll doesn’t necessarily come naturally when it comes to online poker. The fun and excitement of it all tends to get minds a wondering, and hopes a leaping, even for the most conservative of characters. Maybe though, we should think of ourselves as more conservative characters, like the blue suits who manage money every day as a way of life. Can we not take some lessons from market players who manage millions of dollars?

Think of yourself as an investment banker or mutual fund manager. Those professionals will only use a small portion of the money they manage and put it into higher risk opportunities. That doesn’t mean high risk opportunities, it means managing investments properly with an inherent amount of risk and reward scenarios thoroughly analyzed.

They manage for long-term, annual returns. If you take this further and think about it, if you’ve ever seen a wildly high return percentage advertised for a mutual fund like 33% or something like that, then you pretty much know it was a fluke and that there is likely no way that fund is going to repeat that percentage the following year. You don’t trust it. The same should be said for a poker player who makes it big early on in his online endeavours. You can’t trust him to repeat it – because you know it is a fluke. He is a fish, burning to give it back.

There are bankroll management programs available online some of them free that can help you to this end. Using one of them can make your thinking process much more professional in terms of how you handle your online poker accounts. How often do you think a mutual fund manager says things like, let’s let the whole thing right on this one stock I got a good feeling. I’m feeling really lucky about this stock, let’s go for it. Let’s just try and double up or get the heck out of its business. Let’s move up because what we’re doing so far isn’t working.

If the sound familiar you might not need a new poker book as much as you need an investment manual.

If you are like me, then you play a lot of a multi-table sit and go tournaments online. They are really great in terms of keeping your time spent in tournaments confined to segments, that don’t intrude on as much of your time as the open multi-table tournaments. There have been many times when I wanted to play a tournament by only had maybe three hours maximum. In that sense, I look to the 90 seat or 180 seat sit and go tournaments that you can find at poker stars and full tilt poker.

It’s in these tournaments that I’ve also noticed something else about the final table. That is of course when make the final table. The thing is I in the habit of profiling my opponents all the way through every tournament I play, so when I do make the final table. I know what kind of players I come up against. Oddly though, once you do get to the final table, you may find like I do, is that the majority of your opponents put on their best TAG suit and step up to the game.

I even find this when leading up to the final table, a good number of your opponents actually had different profiles ranging from gambler, to elephant, to eagle. So why all of a sudden, when the final table convenes do players change their colors? Is it mostly because the tag players are the ones who have survived throughout the tournament or do players get serious enough about the game that they actually changed their profiles to adapt to game conditions?

I think it’s a combination of both really. Last final table I was at there was one rock and eight TAG players. Even though was only a four dollar hundred and 80 players sit and go tournament, by the time I got to the final table, my opponents were playing like professionals. Virtually all the pots were heads up, there was pre-flop raising. There was post-flop aggression, and there were sensible critical game plays that led to four living or re-raising with very few hands going to the river.

I liken this to what Dan Harrington refers to in his no limit hold them series, in that a player must change his style of play. Based on the conditions of the tournament, no matter what his natural or comfortable playing zone really is. It’s the same way in the sit and go tournaments, you generally have to become tight aggressive when the blinds become so astronomical that there’s just no more room to play around, like you might’ve been leading up to the final table.

And don’t forget even though these are low buy-in tournaments, a lot of the players at final tables at these levels never been to a final table before, and although the winnings modest, they could be rather significant to your opponents bankroll. So be surprised. Next time you get to the final table that most of your opponents are strong TAG players, and they seem to know exactly what they’re doing.

Getting eliminated in a poker tournament is NEVER a good feeling, and the underlying idea is certainly to make it as deep as you can in every tournament you enter, but is that all there is to it? Of course you understand by now that poker is anything but a simple game, and tournament strategy requires even more layered thinking for long term success and profitability.

One of the most important factors when strategizing in poker tournaments is making the money. For some players, this isn’t actually that important as their bankroll is at a level of comfort having 50, 100 and even 200 buy-ins or more, waiting in their account for the next tournament. A lot of rounders and pros will play more aggressively in this situation because they want to make the money with a healthy stack.

For most online players though, this simply isn’t the case and making the money should be of paramount importance. The reason for this is because when you are actually building a bankroll, the best money to play with is that of your opponents, not your own. I call this OPM, or Other Players’ Money, and if you are just starting out in online poker, then OPM is your only way to long term success, save for extraordinary luck.

The only way to start using OPM is to do your utmost to make the money in every tournament you play. It may not be optimum play for a large payout, but in the low limits it does work for several reasons. Firstly, there are enough donkey playing fools in online poker that will essentially put you in the money by virtue of their impatient, ill advised aggression.

Secondly, the attrition rate in low limit tournaments is quick sometimes, that you can count on your actually entry fee to be worth at least double what you paid.

Lastly, you can count on making the money about 15 to 20 percent of the time, and no matter how you play, the math is on your side that you will make the final table often enough to earn those higher payouts, no matter how tight you play.

Now adopting this philosophy normally requires tight-aggressive Harrington style play, but it’s not so easy to stick to that style while witnessing the foolish players around you and their lucky, but growing stacks. Getting caught up in that though, means you are playing on your lack of emotional control, and not using a solid winning strategy.

It all comes down to numbers and probabilities. If you play tight aggressive, you will make the money often enough to build your OPM bankroll, and then play risk free forever more. Now, what do you really think is more profitable?

The beauty of poker is that it is easy to learn but almost impossible to fully master. A player who has learned the basics of poker strategy including starting hand selection, the various kinds of odds and table position looking at advanced poker strategy tips and information needs to cover many areas. This article suggests 5 advanced poker strategy areas that can improve any player’s poker skills.

Advanced Poker Strategy Area #1 – Game Theory

Game theory is actually a branch of mathematics which looks at situations where 2 or more people have conflicting interests. It can be applied to poker in many ways. The most common example is ‘Optimal Bluffing Strategy’ in which you aim to randomize your bluffs in a way that is ‘unexploitable’ by opponents. This advanced poker strategy involves making your bluff frequency exactly the same as the odds your opponent receives to call the final bet.

Advanced Poker Strategy Area #2 – The Independent Chip Model (ICM)

ICM is a model which gives a tournament player’s chip stack a dollar value based on prize pool distribution and the stacks of remaining players. It is then used to calculate your true risk – in terms of dollars not chips – when making a decision during play. This advanced poker strategy is commonly used in Sit and Go tournaments but can be equally useful in multi-table poker tournaments.

Advanced Poker Strategy Area #3 – Heads-Up Poker Play

There are actually 2 advanced poker strategies designed for heads-up play. Both are used at the end of tournaments and rely on math to ensure that an opponent has no numerical way to exploit you. The first is known as the SAGE system and the second ‘Nash-Equilibrium’. Becoming an expert in these systems will help you reach that number one spot – where the big payout is!

Advanced Poker Strategy Area #4 – Stack Size Flexibility and Inflection Points

Made famous by Dan Harrington the concept of ‘M’, zones and inflection points is a must for players learning advanced poker strategy for tournaments. You can calculate your ‘M’ score at any point during a tournament by dividing your chips by the blinds and antes. This score is then used to assign a ‘zone’ which dictates your strategy as you travel through inflection points (changes between zones).

Advanced Poker Strategy Area #5 – Rail-Birding The Online Pros

Watching the professional online tournament players at work is a great way to pick up advanced poker strategy tips. Effective rail-birding involves analyzing the hand as a whole rather than just the cards in play. Stack-sizes and reads are just two of the many things to watch out for.

ROI Stands for ‘Return on Investment’ and is a commonly used way of calculating your profits in poker. The exact method of calculating ROI will vary depending on which form of the game is played. A more useful figure for poker players may be ‘hourly rate’ which takes into account the time spent playing.

1) Calculating Poker ROI for Tournaments / Sit and Goes

ROI for tournaments is expressed as a percentage of your original buy-in. It is standard in poker to remove 100% (buy-in) from the calculation at the end. For example:

You play 100 tournaments each with a buy in of $10 + $1 fee and end up with a total bankroll of $1600.

ROI = (1600)/(1100) or 145% – remove the 100% (standard format) and you have a ROI of 45% for those tournaments.

2) Calculating ROI for Cash Games

ROI for cash games becomes a little more difficult. This is because you need a time frame over which to calculate your return. The standard poker format for this is to use 100 hands. For example.

You play 1000 hands of poker over a single session and make $500 profit. Your buy-in for the game st the start was $200. ROI is thus 50% per 100 hands. It is also common in poker cash games to calculate profit as the number of big blinds won per 100 hands. In this example with blinds at $2/$1 you could note your profits as 25 Big Blinds per 100 hands.

3) Hourly Rates – A More Useful Number?

ROI in both of the above examples does not factor in the time you spent playing the game. To get a truely useful number you need to divide your total profit by the time at the tables. This figure can then be used to compare different formats of the game, buy-in levels or different poker sites to see which is the most profitable.