POTD #20 Final Table Friday Super High Roller Bowl Online vs Dan Shak

By any measure, live tournament poker and live high rollers are currently booming. We are seeing record prize pools, field sizes, and an unprecedented volume of tournament series. A common refrain I’ve heard at the table is that there are too many tournaments to play them all. The growth of tournament poker is easy to see, but that has not stopped some people from trotting out the same tired criticisms about what’s wrong with tournament poker. A couple of months ago, former Poker Pro and current YouTuber and card room owner Doug Polk wrote a long post on Twitter about tournament poker. An excerpt is quoted below:

“Tournaments are an extremely standardized format, and if you are going to play for a living you can dedicate an inordinate amount of time to knowing the in/outs of all of the different types of situations.”

I do play a lot of tournaments and do study a lot, but I bristled at the idea that tournaments are “extremely standardized.” I think, for the most part, cash games are more standardized: There is less variety in stack size, and the payouts are always symmetrical-- if you win $1, someone else at the table loses $1. If anything, popular non-standard variants like deuce-seven bounties and stand-up games are attempts to make cash games more like tournaments. The goal is not to play a strategy that maximizes your EV in one hand, but that maximizes your EV over the entire session.

The culture in tournaments tends to be competitive and serious, where cash games tend to favour people who like lots of action, but the irony of this is that there’s nothing more degenerate than poker tournaments. There’s been a lot of discussion about how multi-leg sports betting parlays are catnip for casual sports bettors (and profit centers for sportsbooks); well, what’s a poker tournament if not a massive parlay on the results of hundreds of poker hands? Imagine telling someone that you were playing blackjack and you turned $10,000 into $100,000, but you can’t leave the table for a long time, and your most likely outcome is winning $20,000 or nothing, but sometimes you’ll win $10,000,000. That experience is roughly what bagging the chip lead of day 1 of the World Series of Poker Main Event is like.

The way to make money in tournaments is by staying in the tournament for as long as possible to secure a big cash. A way to make money in cash games is staying in the game by playing fast, giving soft action, and having a genial table presence. Both tournament and cash game players are trying to stay in the game, they just have different ways of going about it.¹ Today’s hand I made a $100k final table with a non-standardized, top-heavy payout structure. I attempted to adjust my strategy based on the payouts and on my opponent; I over adjusted and made a costly mistake.

2020 Super High Roller Bowl Online

40k/80k/10k (SB/BB/BBA) We are in the money.

The Hand:

I’ve loved writing the Substack and appreciate all the positive feedback I’ve gotten thus far. One thing I have not liked is transcribing hand histories. Thankfully, the good folks at PokerGO have made things easy today. Screenshot below.