Many of our childhoods were marked by a love for playing games. You may have gotten your start with a game like Dungeons and Dragons. Young people (and some not so young people) can really get into it. They spend hours and hours going on adventures, rolling funny-shaped dice, and trying to not let their character die. The more you played, the more likely you realized that there were some underlying strategies that make the game work.
If you can use those strategies when your opponents don’t, you have a better chance of living to play another day.
Nowadays, millions of people play strategy games like World of Warcraft or Call Of Duty, and the truth learned when you were 12 still holds true. If you can understand and leverage the underlying strategies that make the game work, you have a much better chance of winning. You learn pretty quickly that going against the grain of a principle in the game is done at your own peril. In a game like Call of Duty, you can literally walk right into an ambush.
Shot dead. Game over.
You might be thinking that poker is nothing like Call of Duty. That’s a video game, this is real life. But let me frame it up this way: Poker Tournaments have a lot more in common with strategy games than you might think.
For example: If you are thinking about poker tournaments in the same way that you think about cash poker, you are making a huge mistake.
There’s a concept in economics called a sunk cost. It’s defined on Wikipedia as a cost that has already been incurred and cannot be recovered. In poker tournaments, when you run out of chips, the money you paid to enter the tournament is a sunk cost. You can’t get it back unless you’re in the top 10% of the field. When you’re out of chips in a cash game, you can just rebuy and try to win your money back. In a tournament, when you run out of chips, they stop dealing you cards, and you have to leave.
That’s not a good feeling. You have to go on the dreaded Walk of Shame where the dealer yells, “Seat Open.” All eyes turn to you as everyone wants to know who busted out. Walk of Shame indeed.
In tournament poker, there is a huge value in keeping your chips. In fact, a chip that you lose is worth more than adding a chip to your stack.
Let me repeat that, a chip you lose is worth more than a chip added to your stack.
How can that be, you might ask? Both chips are worth whatever amount is printed on the chip. Obviously that is true, but the utility of that chip in a tournament is different. When you lose a chip, it takes you closer to having zero chips, and being out of the tournament. Winning a chip increases your stack size, which is good, but the value of that chip is less than the one you might have lost.
So in a poker tournament, there are some situations that play more like a strategy game than just a poker game. You obviously are playing each hand that you get dealt, but you also have to consider other factors like stage of the tournament, your stack size, your opponents stack size, proximity to the money bubble, etc.
There will be times in a tournament that you make a play you would never make in a cash game because of tournament strategies, not because of the two cards that you are holding. Once you understand the game within the game, your tournament results will improve dramatically.
Do you play other strategy games outside of poker? If so which ones? Let us know in the comments below.