Cash games and tournaments are like apples and oranges. In cash games you play each hand for the value of that hand alone. In a cash game, if you have a hand in which you like your odds, you’re willing to go for it with all your chips.

In a tournament, in the same situation, it’s completely different, because if you’re wrong, you lose everything. If you have a healthy stack of 100,000 chips and you run into a guy with 90,000, you don’t want to play a coin flip for all your chips, because at this stage in the game they can be better used to take advantage of smaller stacks.

In a side game, if there are 20,000 chips in the pot and your opponent bets your last 60,000, and you feel you’re at least forty-something percent to win, it’s just a straight math problem. And if you lose the pot, you just reach into your pocket and buy more chips, because if you’re a good cash game player, you’re properly financed for the game you’re playing.

Moreover, if you do well at the beginning of a ring game and run badly at the end, you’ll probably come out even. In a tournament, you can do great at the beginning, but towards the end (when they raise the blinds and a bet and a call costs as much as you made the whole of Day 1), you lose two hands and you’re finished.

The good thing about tournaments is that if you lose a string of pots, then you’re out. If this happens in a cash game, you’re likely to start steaming and can end up burning up a lot of money. “I can’t keep running bad”, you say to yourself, and, before you know it, you’ve lost your whole gambling bankroll.

A lot of these strong, super-aggressive tournament players are no good in side games, because when things go against them, they play terribly. Usually they’d just bust out of the tournament, so no one would notice – the ‘steam factor’ goes out the window. The best cash game players, therefore, are resilient; they can take a hell of a beating and just bounce back.

Good tournament play is a difficult skill to master, and tournament players deserve credit for their achievements, but the best poker players in the world are the high stakes cash game players.
David Gray

Here’s a link to the latest Online Poker Room Review Directory from the crew down the road at Gooners Guide to Gambling. (PS: A Gooner is an Arsenal Football Club supporter… derived from “Gunner”, but these guys are really just online gambling fans with a minor bias towards the red and white).