Worse than Nothing
Original article found at: http://www.texasholdem-poker.com/gswann.php
By Greg Swann
I took first place in an online poker tournament for the first time recently. Don't congratulate me. The competition was very weak.
How weak?
The fourth place finisher, call him WeekendAtBernies, did not play. You read that right. He didn't take his seat, so he timed out on the first hand. The software put him in 'sitting-out' mode, post-and-fold, and he posted-and-folded his way into a fourth place finish. And he lasted a lot longer than the fifth place finisher, just blindly posting his blinds and folding to any bet.
It was a ten-player ring-game-style tournament, and six of the entrants did substantially worse than WeekendAtBernies, who bested them by doing absolutely nothing. Everything those other six did turned out to be worse than doing nothing at all!
Do you think this is a fluke? In a huge multi-player tournament, a pretty little lady, let's call her DeathBecomesHer, sat out for her entire time at the tables. She finished 197th out of 396 entrants. She beat more than half the field by doing nothing!
If you've been reading your poker books, you already know what all those 'live ones' did wrong: They played in too many pots, they played weak starting hands, they kept betting (or most often just calling) after they were beat, and they learned nothing at all from their losses. In other words, they played like unschooled fish.
This is not a cause for despair. As a beginning poker player, the bulk of your profits will come from unschooled fish--sweet and generous optimists who will call your full house all the way to the river with a pair of nines.
But in order to reap those profits, you have to learn to play poker at least well enough to beat virtual corpses like WeekendAtBernies and DeathBecomesHer. And it turns out that low- or no-buy-in tournaments can be an economical way to get a lot of great practical experience.
Not tournament experience as such, just raw experience--for a negligible investment. In low-roller tournaments, a substantial number of entrants will be the same kind of unschooled fish you will run into at micro-limit tables--loose, aggressive and clueless. They will bet anything into anyone from any position, and they will keep betting all the way to the river if they think they have even a ghost of a chance.
The benefit for you is that you get to play a lot of poker without much risk. You'll see fifty or more starting hands, each one requiring you to make a sound judgment. You'll see a few flops of your own and many more that you passed on. You'll be able to relate betting to tells and gain valuable experience at putting players on hands. And, yes, just as in micro-limit ring-games, you will get sucked out from time to time by river rats betting to the end with rags.
And getting sucked out, if you can bear up to it, will give you some of the great weapons of winning poker: discipline, patience, courage and rationality. Discipline to play the game you know is right; as a beginner, that may be Lee Jones poker or Gary Carson poker or Lou Krieger poker or David Sklansky poker. Patience to wait for premium starting hands. Courage to play those hands aggressively, to make the suckout artists at your table pay to play against you. And rationality to release your hand when you know it is beaten.
In the short run, the unschooled fish will seem to have the better strategy. One or two will accumulate a vast stack of chips, only to lose them to other fish over the next few hands. In the long run, each one of them will be eliminated, just as the fish at my table were all eliminated ahead of the posting-and-folding WeekendAtBernies.
It is important to note that everyone in a tournament will be eliminated except the ultimate winner. The goal is not so much to avoid elimination but to avoid being eliminated early, as the result of foolish play. Tournament strategy, especially at later rounds, is very different from ring-game strategy. Skilled tournament players will very probably eat you for lunch, giving you no action when you have the best hand and all you can stand when your hand is second best. But if you play a disciplined, patient, courageous and rational ring-game strategy, you should be able to last a good, long time.
And where fifty or a hundred hands at a micro-limit ring-game might cost you a small bundle, if it turns out that you know less than you thought you did, your maximum risk in a low-roller tournament is the amount of your buy-in, anywhere from six dollars to nothing.
If you can last to the first break in a multi-table tournament, that's a victory. If you can survive to the top half, you'll know that you're at least as good as DeathBecomesHer.
In a ring-game-style tournament, set your sights on WeekendAtBernies, fourth place or better. That way you'll know for sure that your poker game is better than nothing.
And, at low limits, better than nothing is halfway to being good!