Online Holdem

When you are playing single table tournaments with 10 players behind the table, then mathematically your chance of getting the overall best hands during the tournament is 9 to 1 or 10%. It is true regardless of your skill level. Good cards will not be dealt to you just because you are more skillful than others. It is called luck factor. However your skill level determines how successful you are able to play the cards you are given. I’m pretty convinced the best poker player in the world cannot consistently win every single tournament with 9 other players who barely know the rules of the game. Even Phil Hellmuth has said that if no luck factor was involved, he would win every single time.

Now suppose you are playing a tournament with 1000 participants. The chance you will get the best cards at best situations is 999 to 1. Even if you are the best poker player in the world, the chance you will win the tournament is pretty slim. That is the reason why we often see amateur poker players win biggest poker tournaments in the world.

If you have decided to stick with a certain limit to the tournament buy-in and you are fairly certain you have an average or above average skill level compared to the rest of the players at the same level, you can reasonably expect to play 999 tournaments with 1000 participants without winning one single time.

Why is it important to know that? Well, first you must make sure you are emotionally capable of not winning much for an extended period of time and secondly you must be sure you can financially allow this to happen. Of course not winning a tournament doesn’t necessarily mean you will not win any money, but that the variation is much bigger than in cash games. If a cash game player can reasonably expect to win most of their sessions with profit, the opposite is true for the tournaments player. Even the best poker players end most of their tournaments without even winning enough money to cover the entrance fee. Big wins are what makes it up for them and big wins come rarely. If you want to be successful, then this is what you have to accept. Being too hard on yourself for not winning a tournament will not do any good and you may pretty soon find yourself wondering why you are still playing the game. This can happen, if you don’t know the simple mathematics behind this. So now you know.

In holdem tournaments, it is all about survival. It is not about how many chips you have or about how much money you will win if you have the most chips. If you only focus on growing your stack size, you will very soon find yourself being eliminated, when a lucky card hits your opponent river, even when you were miles ahead at flop. If you want to survive, you must not focus on your chips at the beginning at all. You might succeed with grabbing as many chips as possible in play money tables or freerolls, but things are radically different in tournaments with real buy-ins. Even if you manage to double your chip count by risking a lot at the beginning, you will very soon find out that is not enough to compete with more experienced guys, who start taking more chances in the later rounds. In the 10th level of the tournament your doubled chip stack will only be able to pay for a round of blinds or two anyway.

Experienced holdem players know, that they are able to last long in the tournament only if they are patient and if they don’t take risks that are unnecessary.

Before you jump in, study the specifics of holdem tournaments. To do that, I suggest you to play freerolls or in other words tournaments that will not cost any money for you to get in. It is also important not to stick with this kind of tournaments for too long. It is because players don’t have anything to loose at these tourneys and thus play very loosely. If you get too comfortable with this playstyle and you find yourself winning, I can guarantee you, you will be a losing player at even the most lowest tournament buy-ins, when you switch over to real money tournaments. However if you have no bankroll, you really love playing freerolls and you never plan to make a transition to real money tables, you can of course carry on with what you are doing.

Once you have played all the different tournaments and know their specific rules, it is time for you to pick your favorite and start playing at lowest limits – usually 1$ buy-in tournaments.

Before you start with holdem tournaments, you should ask yourself why you chose tournaments over cash games or holdem over any other poker game. Is it because you like tournaments over the cash games or is it just because you saw some cool poker players playing at the final table of a tournament in television. If your motivation behind playing tournaments is the imitation of your idols, then you must know that no poker player ever became famous just because they imitated someone or just because they wanted to. They became stars, because they love that game and they have their own play style.

If you feel you really like cash games more, then just play them. There are also famous cash games players if becoming famous is still your goal. Don’t do something just because it looks cool. Do something, because you enjoy doing it. Without love for the game, you will set yourself up for a big failure, if you still insist you must become a start.