No Limit Holdem Advice

Cash games and tournaments are two horses of a very different color. Despite that fact that no-limit hold’em is the most popular variant in each style, there are a multitude of strategy adjustments that must be made when switching from one to another.

It is rare to find a cash game player who completely resists the lure of tournaments. For a few reasons, tournaments are very appealing. First, there is the “lottery effect” where you can turn a relatively small investment into a huge sum with some luck. Second, tournaments are where most of the TV time and celebrity exposure is at. No one particularly cares about a guy who makes $2 million in cash games, but a guy who does that in tournaments stands to receive an endorsement deal and TV exposure (at least a few years ago, anyway).

Here are some common mistakes that cash game players make in tournaments:

Splashing Around Too Much

Cash game players are accustomed to playing with deep stacks. Players in most cash games have a stack of 100 big blinds or more. Tournaments simply don’t work this way. After the first few levels, the average stack in a tournament is usually 25-60 big blinds depending on the quality of the structure and competition. Oftentimes, cash game players are too slow to adjust to the shorter stacks. One of the major adjustments that needs to be made is fewer hands are played meaning fewer raises are called before the flop. When stacks are 200 big blinds deep, it can make sense to call a raise with Six-Five suited. In a tournament when stacks are just 50 big blinds deep, this becomes much less of a viable play.

Giving People Too Much Credit

The value of re-stealing in a tournament is sometimes lost on cash game players. For example, when a tournament player is down to just 15 big blinds and an aggressive player makes a raise, it can make good sense for the player to re-raise all-in with a hand like Ace-Nine suited. All too often, cash game players don’t realize the value in making this play. They tend to give the player more credit for having a huge hand rather than acknowledging that it makes sense for them to be re-raising all-in with a fairly sizable range. This is because, in cash games, when a player moves all-in preflop, they usually have a monster, so cash game players have been conditioned to think “all-in preflop = big hand”.

Making Hero Calls

Cash game players are used to being able to take gambles on making very thin calls. After all, if they’re wrong, they can always just reload in their typical game. In tournaments, it makes less sense for players to bluff since if their bluff fails, they’re out of the tournament. Cash game players aren’t always aware of this, and therefore have a tendency to make big “hero calls” on the river thinking their opponent is bluffing. While river bluffs occur regularly in cash games, they’re really not used much by players in tournaments.