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Introduction to The Poker Tournament Formula II: Advanced Strategies for Big Money Tournaments |
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Introduction: Most of What You Know is WrongBy Arnold Snyder(Cardoza Publishing, 2008. Paperback, 368 pages. Available June 27, 2008) © Arnold Snyder 2008 If you want to make money in pro-level no-limit hold’em tournaments, you must abandon a lot of what you already know about playing poker. If you’ve been playing cash games for years and you consider yourself a solid player, that’s a handicap when you start entering tournaments. Likewise, while there are a lot of books on the market today on how to play tournaments, and some of the tips in these books are excellent, for the most part, the authors who have written these books are handicapped by being a bunch of poker players, or worse, mathematicians! Coming from backgrounds of years of poker play or too much higher education, they focus so much on poker and the mathematics of poker that they miss most of what’s really important about optimal tournament strategy. A tournament is not a poker game, and the mathematics of tournaments is not the mathematics of poker. In this book, I’m going to teach you how to play pro-level no-limit hold’em tournaments. You should understand from the start that unless I state otherwise, I am specifically discussing and analyzing multi-table no-limit hold’em tournaments that begin with full (nine or ten-spot) tables, and play down to a single winner. I am not writing about satellites, limit tournaments, pot-limit tournaments, or shorthanded or heads-up tournaments, and I’m not writing about cash games. Much of what I disclose will likely be applicable to some of these other types of tournaments, but make no assumptions. Also, my personal experience in these pro-level events has been exclusively in live tournaments, though I have attempted to address online differences that would be caused by the increased speed of play. Your poker skills and experience will serve you well in these events if you can incorporate them into the optimal tournament strategies, but poker skills without optimal tournament strategy are pretty much wasted in a tournament. A slow-structured no-limit hold’em tournament isn’t about pot odds, effective odds, implied odds, or reverse implied odds. It isn’t about how many outs you have for your nut flush draw. It isn’t even about which starting hands you should play and how you should play them based on your chip stack, position and the action in front of you. You need not be a mathematician to make money playing poker tournaments. I will explain the math as necessary, but it’s a lot simpler than most authors would have you believe. Tournaments, and especially no-limit tournaments, are comparatively easy to make money in if you stop thinking like a poker player. How This Book Is Different from My First Poker Tournament BookIf you have read The Poker Tournament Formula (let’s call it “PTF1” to distinguish it from this book), then you already have a pretty good foundation for strategic thinking in pro-level tournaments. The bigger buy-in pro-level events, like the “fast” small buy-in tournaments I focused on in PTF1, are all about structure, though the structural differences make for some very different optimal strategies.This book will focus on these slow tournament strategies, picking up where PTF1 left off. Specifically, we’ll be focusing on live tournaments with blind levels that last 40 minutes and longer (with 60-minute blind levels being most common), or online tournaments with blind levels that last roughly 20 minutes and longer (assuming your online poker tournament plays at the speed of 60 hands per hour). If these are the tournaments you are playing (or want to play), then this book is for you. Still, I would advise you to read PTF1 if you haven’t already, as that book provides a foundation for thinking about all tournaments, and every tournament becomes faster as the blind levels increase. I’m not going to rehash in this book everything I’ve already written in PTF1, though some of the concepts from that book will be expanded upon as necessary. This book will also show you how to optimize your strategy for each specific tournament you enter. Pro-level tournaments are not all created equal. If you play in a lot of the events during a WPT or WSOP Circuit series, there are important structural differences between events with different buy-ins. Even if all of the events you play are no-limit hold’em tournaments with no rebuys, full (nine or ten-spot) tables and hour-long blind levels, the different amounts of starting chips in these events will have enough of an effect on each tournament’s structure to significantly alter the optimal playing strategies. The optimal strategy for a $1000 event will be very different from the optimal strategy for the $3000 event, and this will differ significantly from the optimal strategy for the $10,000 main event. To help you understand optimal playing strategies based on structure, I will also introduce the important concept of chip utility, and provide a simple method for ranking tournaments according to their respective utility factors. None of this requires difficult math and there isn’t any difficult math to do at the tables. Once you understand a specific tournament’s structure, and how that structure changes as you go through blind levels and players are eliminated, you’ll be able to play much more by “feel” and much less by using the formulaic systems based on flawed mathematical logic that have dominated much of tournament thinking for decades. Again, as I stated in PTF1, the cards you are dealt are the least important factor in your tournament success. If your idea of a great poker book is one that has lots of sample hands with instructions on how to play them, you will be happier with any of the dozens of other tournament books on the shelves at Barnes & Noble. Neil D. Myers wrote a book of hand examples as a companion guide for PTF1, and he seems to be good at this job. But fast tournaments lend themselves very well to formulaic strategies, provided you base your play more on your position than your cards. I’m not sure if Neil can do the same thing for the strategies in this book. And I’m not going to spoon-feed you a lot of hand analyses because I never read them myself. I’ve rarely seen hand examples that answered the questions that have to be answered in real-world tournament situations in order to make a decision. This book will teach you to ask new questions, and give you the means to answer them. In PTF1, I provided “basic strategies” to cover a wide range of situations because fast tournaments simply don’t allow for much fancy play. The simple position basic strategies described in PTF1 for fast tournaments can also be applied selectively in slow tournaments, and I use these strategies myself in slow tournaments and with great success. But slow tournaments also require a greater range of tournament skills and strategies to get you to the money. Slow tournament structures call for more creativity and unpredictability. There are many more options on how to play the same hand, even when you are in the same position and face the same opponent(s) with the same size chip stacks at the same blind level. There are fewer automatic plays. Some of the tactics covered in this book are smallball theory, longball theory, approaches to playing a short stack, approaches to playing a big stack, early strategies, late strategies, bubble strategies, final table strategies, how to play when you’re card dead, how to play a rush, and changing gears. This book will also discuss specific techniques for bluffing, calling suspected bluffs, creating a table image, and reading your opponents. But the emphasis in all of these discussions on tactics and techniques will be on how they relate to the overall tournament structure and your chip utility. I’m going to start this book by focusing on how you should be thinking when you sit down to play a pro-level, slow-structured tournament. When you look out at the sea of players surrounding you, each one with a stack of chips in front of him the same as yours, your goal is not just to see if you can win some money playing poker. Your aim is to bankrupt every player in this event. You must finish this tournament with a virtual mountain of chips, more chips than you have ever had in front of you, or that you have ever seen in front of any player, in a regular poker game. You don’t accomplish this goal by thinking about which hands you should enter the pot with. You can throw the mathematics of poker out the window. It’s time to start thinking about the mathematics of fear. I’m not going to include a lot of advice for rank beginners in this book. I’m going to assume you understand the common jargon of poker and that you do not need a primer on how to play the game. I assume you know which hold’em hands are generally considered strong and weak, and you have no trouble reading the board. If you need a primer on no-limit hold’em tournaments, I’ll refer you to PTF1 which covers all of that and a lot more. I felt conflicted writing this book, because I’m actively playing pro-level tournaments myself, and I’m making money in these events. I’ve asked myself why I would want to give such valuable information to potential opponents. I seriously considered calling my publisher and telling him that, contract or no contract, I had decided against sending him the manuscript. I have no desire to put my name on a bad poker book that contains nothing but a lot of rehashed fluff, and the book I’ve written—in which I greatly enjoy tearing apart a lot of the accepted ideas on how to make money in pro-level events—is really too valuable to publish. In the end, I wrote this book for the many tournament players who have written to thank me for PTF1. I basically view this book as a gift to them. And because this book contains a lot of information that is contrary to the material in other books on how to play poker tournaments, I’m sure many players who have read all the books will disagree with what is revealed within these pages. How can everybody else be wrong? Some noted “authorities” on the game will attempt to refute my findings, just as they tried with PTF1, and since people don’t abandon their gurus very easily, I don’t really think I have to worry too much about making the fields of tournament players I’m facing significantly stronger. Besides, my experience in three decades of professional gambling has been that even when players know exactly what they should do, most are unable to do it if it requires any guts. In any case, if you number yourself among the few who aren’t afraid to question authority, and you have the guts to do what you need to do to win, this book is for you. So hang on tight. As race car legend Mario Andretti put it: “If everything seems under control, you’re just not going fast enough.” ♠ |
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Arnold Snyder's Poker Tournament Formula II: Advanced Strategies for Big Money TournamentsArnold Snyder's Poker Tournament Formula II is a radical new approach to optimal strategy for professional level, slow-structured, big buy-in no-limit hold'em poker tournaments. |
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