Tournaments vs. Ring games.

Every serious poker player keeps a record of his loss/winnings. Every month I take a look at it to see how good I am doing. This month I saw a pattern that I never realized before; I am a better tournament player than a ring player. Combining my house games, online and live tournaments, I win 3 times as often as regular ring games in the casino or online.

As a matter of fact, my records show that I haven’t lost a single house game since April 2004. That may be because I usually play with the same people and friends (it is so easy to learn your friends tells J). But the same is true for ring games at the casino; almost always I end up playing with a table were 70% of the players I played against before but I still don’t win 100% of the time as in house games.

When I start thinking about it, it all make sense. In a tournament you will play the same players for an extended period of time, meanwhile in a ring game I’ve seen people changing tables in less than 30 minutes!!!! Therefore, it is harder to build a reliable history on players betting habits and tells.

In addition, I believe that tournaments are mercier on you than a ring games. I have dozens of examples where I did several mistakes and was the lowest stack in the table and I end up wining the tournament. However, a bad decision in a ring game tend to cost you all your stack.

Tournaments change gears all the time, making the table more dynamic. In a ring game you play virtually 8-10 people all the time which may lead to boredom or playing crappy/marginal hands. However, in tournaments, the number of players keeps going down changing the value of hands, betting amounts and the odds leading you to stay alert in the action all the time. Also, don’t forget the blinds which keep increasing with time!

Finally, I noticed it is easier to be patient in tournaments because as long as you are in the table you are winning. However, in ring games, chip stack is the winning indicator and as a lot of players had found out over centuries, it can be very volatile. This change in chip stack will affect your winning state of mind leading you to play more hands trying get your stack back.

One last word, when I mention tournaments in this post, I refer to single-table tournaments. I consider multi-table tournaments a hybrid between single-table tournaments and ring games. The speed of the game keeps changing because the blinds keep going up. And watching more and more tables being merged gives you a winning feeling. Once, you get to the last table, it becomes a single-table tournament and you should change your tactics accordingly.