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INTRODUCTION TO THE POKER TOURNAMENT FORMULA
Or... Why A New Approach to Winning Poker Tournaments is Long Overdue
By Arnold Snyder
(Cardoza Publishing, 2006. Paperback, 368 pages. Available June 27, 2006)
© Arnold Snyder 2006
I am going to show you how to make money in the "fast" no-limit hold'em tournaments that are now so popular on the Internet and in poker rooms all over the country. I'm also going to show you how to stop being at the mercy of the cards you are dealt, and how to adjust your strategy for each poker tournament you play. You will also learn exactly why you must learn to do these things if you have any intention of making money in these tournaments.
What is a "fast" poker tournament? It's any multi-table tournament that has blind levels that last less than an hour. These events generally have buy-ins from $20 to $1,000, and last anywhere from two hours to six or seven hours at the maximum. If you think that the strategies for beating these tournaments are the same strategies that you would use to beat the major events you see on television, you are mistaken. And if you think you can use a single one-size-fits-all strategy to beat poker tournaments, you are mistaken again, and your mistake is costing you money.
Many players seem to believe that a no-limit hold'em tournament is a no-limit hold'em tournament, and they approach every event the same way. This is wrong. The blind structure of any specific tournament more than any other factor alters not only hand values, but optimal playing and betting strategies, as well as bankroll requirements. Even small changes in the blind structure require significant changes in your strategy. Structure is the key problem players in fast tournaments must deal with in order to win. My focus on structure means that I will quickly gloss over many of the topics that other books focus on. They are simply not all that important in fast poker tournaments. Topics other authors have not even considered will be expounded upon at length.
This book will be different from every other book on poker you've read, even if you've read them all. This is not a rehash of the same old stuff that all of the major poker authors have already said. This is something entirely new, from a different type of professional gambler's perspective, and it works.
If you picked this book up because you are a beginner, and you apply yourself, you should soon be making a lot of money in fast poker tournaments from many more experienced poker players (and you don't need a big bankroll to do it). If you are an advanced player and you've read all of the major books on this subject, this book will contain analyses and strategies that will surprise you.
In addition to the structure, the fast tournaments also differ significantly from the major big money events in the quality of your opponents, which will run the gamut from knowledgeable, dangerous, and obviously experienced poker tournament players to downright oafs who do not even know the standard rules and procedures of poker. The fact is that you can use strategies against more knowledgeable players that will never succeed against an oaf. This book will deal with these types of problems too.
If you currently play regularly in fast poker tournaments, you have probably noticed players who seem to make the final tables consistently. You may think that these players are just lucky, and get dealt more good hands than you do. You may think they suck out so much they must have some kind of a pact with the devil. In fact, if you read this book, you'll learn what they are doing. And soon you will be feeling a whole lot luckier yourself.
The Real Money-Making Approach, Live and Online
For every player who enters a major $10,000 buy-in poker tournament, there are at least a thousand players who enter a fast tournament. In Las Vegas alone, there are more than 400 fast tournaments every week. The number of these tournaments is also exploding in California's poker rooms and other poker rooms all over the country--to say nothing of the online poker rooms, where you will find thousands of online poker tournaments daily. The boom in tournament play represents an influx of unskilled players to the game that makes these fast tournaments one of the richest gambling opportunities I've seen in decades. And you don't have to be a poker star, or have a big bankroll, to take advantage of this opportunity.
This is a book for the 99.99% of no-limit tournament players who are more interested in making money in the tournaments they actually play than in reading about strategies that might work in the major $10,000 events they can't really afford. After all, if you make more money in the poker tournaments you're actually playing, you will have the bankroll for the big events much sooner.
Filling in the Information Gap for Live and Online Poker Tournaments
I've been writing about professional gambling for more than twenty-five years. If you're familiar with my blackjack books and the ways I've analyzed other casino games, you'll understand right off why I'm analyzing poker tournaments from a different perspective. In the mid-1970s, when I started counting cards at blackjack, all of the major authors seemed to provide the same advice. Here's your basic strategy. Here's your counting system. Spread your bets from 1 to 4 or 1 to 8 units at the high counts. You'll win.
What I found at the tables, however—moving back and forth between the single-deck games in Reno and the 4-deck shoes in Las Vegas—was that the major authors were so focused on how to play hands correctly that they had ignored the most important stuff. None of the blackjack authors had spent any ink at all dissecting the structures of the various games and how these structural differences affected optimal playing and betting strategies. In my first book, The Blackjack Formula (1980), I made my name in blackjack as the guy who first analyzed the game's structure, so that strategies could be devised based on the specific game rather than some one-size-fits-all card counting system. With this book, I do the same for poker tournaments.
In my library, I have eighty-four books on poker. I just counted them. This is not a large poker library by any means, as it is primarily focused on the game of no-limit Texas hold'em, and especially poker tournaments. Reading these books, however, gave me much the same feeling I got when I first started reading blackjack books back in the 1970s. Most of the poker authors seemed to be rehashing a lot of the same ideas, focusing on how to play specific hands. My experience in the tournaments I have actually been playing, however, told me that there was a huge gap in the information I was being given. In my first four weeks of play, I played twenty-five tournaments at various Las Vegas casinos, including Luxor, Sam's Town, Orleans, Mirage, Sahara, Sunset Station and Bellagio, with buy-ins ranging from $28 to $1000. The number of players in each tournament ranged from thirty-one to 190, and they all had different amounts of starting chips and different time lengths for the blind levels.
As a professional gambler attempting to apply the strategies I'd learned from poker books, I realized that the major poker authors had ignored the structural differences between tournaments. I knew intuitively that these structural differences made for very different games that required very different approaches. I also knew that the structural differences between tournaments could be analyzed, and if these analyses could isolate the important differences between the tournaments, they would lead to improved strategies and greater profits.
Strategies to Win for Today's
Fast No-Limit Hold'em Tournaments
In the course of playing in these tournaments, analyzing them, and making final tables regularly, I met many poker players of comparatively vast experience who told me they'd never made a final table, and I knew exactly why they weren't getting anywhere. As players who came to these tournaments from a love of poker, and often after having studied all the best poker books, they were so focused on poker strategy, and so ignorant of tournament strategies and how to make money from gambling, that their poker skill and knowledge literally killed their chances of winning.
Part of the problem is that the renowned poker authors have probably not played many of the $40 or $100 or even $500 buy-in tournaments populated primarily by amateurs, where all players start out with very few chips and the blinds go up every fifteen to twenty minutes. And most of their opponents in the major tournaments have probably been very different from the opponents I found in the small buy-in tournaments--the same type that you will be facing in these fast tournaments. None of the authors describe the frantic state of never-ending all-in bets that usually starts about ninety minutes into a fast multi-table tournament, when hordes of desperately short-stacked players start facing blinds they can't afford. It's not that the great poker authors were writing about an entirely different game; they weren't. But they were writing about the game played with an entirely different structure.
This book has been written to fill in all these gaps. It covers the questions fast tournament players need to be asking before they buy-in, including:
- How much of a bankroll do I need?
- How should the number of players affect my game plan?
- How do I optimize a strategy for a specific poker tournament
based on its structure?
- How do I analyze the profit potential of a poker tournament?
- How do I know whether I'm playing a winning poker tournament strategy?
Do my methods of tournament analysis have any applicability to major events with long, slow blind structures? Yes, they do. But these types of tournaments require more advanced poker skills in addition to knowledge of poker tournament strategies. (To learn more about advanced poker skills and theory, I recommend reading books by Doyle Brunson, Mike Caro, T.J. Cloutier, Dan Harrington, Tom McEvoy, and David Sklansky. See the bibliography in the back of this book for recommended titles.) A player who has these advanced poker skills, but who lacks tournament skills, should find a huge value in the methods and techniques I describe. Players with less poker skill and experience can actually start using these
techniques immediately in fast tournaments where traditional poker skills are a smaller factor.
Success Can Be Yours
This book is a gift to the up-and-coming pro gamblers of tomorrow who are trying to build a bankroll today in the fastl tournaments. These tournaments won't make you rich overnight in and of themselves, but they can get you the bankroll and experience you need to take on bigger gambling ventures. Playing in these baby tournaments, you'll learn a lot about gambling and people.
And even if you have no aspirations toward becoming a professional gambler, poker tournaments are fun. Once you start playing them, it's hard not to develop a passion for the game, and making any money at all at a game you enjoy playing is reward enough for many players. This book is for you too.
I have great admiration for the top players I've met in the fast tournaments, the players I've seen over and over again at the final tables. I learned a lot of what I know by watching the winning players who were already doing much of this stuff when I got there.
As to the question a friend asked about whether this book will open the eyes of the tournament hordes, making the fast tournaments tougher to beat, I doubt any book could ever change the one basic fact of poker that has kept the pros going for decades:
There are a lot of fish in the sea. ♠
Back to Recommended Poker Tournament Books at Poker Tournament Formula.com
Back to Arnold Snyder's Blackjack Forum, Recommended Gambling Books
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