I recently won a poker tournament. It made me feel good.
It made me feel good because I hadn't won a tournament in almost two years. I've probably played less than 200 tournaments in that time, many of which have thousands of players, so it's not surprising that I haven't won any. But try telling that to your doubters and your authority figures. Believe me, it's a lot easier to point to a win than it is to point to the laws of statistics.
It made me feel good because it was a big deal, one of the main events in a small room that isn't known for its tournaments. It made me feel good because a lot of people were watching the final table, and they clapped when I won. And since then, a lot of people I don't know, along with my regular opponents, have been congratulating me.
It made me feel good because I dominated. I could point out some mistakes my opponents were making, and I made adjustments to take advantage of those mistakes, and the adjustments paid off. It made me feel good because I felt like I deserved to win.
It felt good to win a trophy and a big banknote. It wasn't that much money, but it had a lot of zeros. The bank teller congratulated me when I deposited it all.
It felt good to go far in a tournament. It was exciting to watch other people's stacks dwindle and disappear while mine grew. It was exciting to win pots where the equity in play was actually significant to my poker life and bankroll. It was even exciting, in a perverse way, to lose a few pots.
A lot of things have made me feel good, and a lot of people have been asking if I plan on playing more tournaments. There’s a part of me that wants to play, but my answer is “no,” and I’ll keep answering that way. I’ve been through this before.
It's great to win a tournament, but it doesn't happen often. Losing not just one tournament, but dozens in a row, with little to no reward, happens much more often. It hurts. To paraphrase Tommy Angelo, the pleasure-to-pain ratio that tournaments offer is enough to drive anyone crazy.
To make matters worse, what makes me enjoy playing tournaments isn’t always a good thing. For lack of a better word, tournaments don’t seem “healthy” to me.
My games of choice these days are deep stack games. Most often, I play $5/$10 cash games with a buy-in of $2,500. Deep stack cash games feature interesting puzzles to solve. They give me a similar pleasure to what people get from solving crossword puzzles. It is intellectually stimulating and fun, and even nights of financial losses are not enough to cause me grief. I win more than I lose, but I have fun anyway.
I rarely have fun playing, only when I'm winning, which is rare. Most of the time I'm just looking for good opportunities, which is part of deep play. A lot of the excitement comes from the fact that these opportunities rarely come along, and when they do they involve pots where the turn of a card makes a difference to my bankroll, and that can make me feel good or bad. This, in my opinion, is very similar to overly risky bets, which in poker we should avoid.
I’m not saying that tournaments don’t present interesting puzzles, but they are few and far between. When you’re playing with 9 or 10 people at the table, with antes, and stacks in the 30s, most of your decisions are trivial and automatic. Even when your decisions do make a big difference, that difference tends to be big not because the expected values of your options are vastly different when measured in big blinds, but because a single big blind tends to represent a lot of real-money equity. In other words, it’s the size of the stacks that gives weight to your decisions. In other words, it’s a risky bet.
But these are risky bets with a certain edge, don't get me wrong. Some tournaments really do represent great opportunities to develop your game, and those are the ones I try to play, and only those. For example, if I have 12 big blinds and everyone at the table folds until it's my turn, and I'm holding A5s in the cut-off, my decision to go all-in is trivial. Putting A5s in that spot is more interesting than putting 72o. Either way, there's not much to think about.
However, the profitability of shoving varies from little to a lot, depending on the folding decisions of the following players. So it's not that my decisions have no value, they just tend to be uninteresting.
I need to remember all of this because after winning a tournament, I have an uncontrollable and irrational desire to play more and more. It's classic efficiency bias, the tournament you win is the tournament where everything goes right for you. Sometimes it doesn't even seem that hard. You're dealt AA and raise, then someone goes all-in and you call, they have KK and you win. Then you're dealt AK and raise again, someone else goes all-in and this time you hit a pair of 9s.
You will probably have to make some genuinely difficult decisions along the way, and if you're not careful, you'll become convinced that those decisions are the reason you won. It seems like everything will repeat itself: just make the right decisions again next time and there's no reason you can't win again! It's easy to forget that sometimes you're the one with KK and you're up against AA, or that you're the one who misses the coin flip, or that sometimes KK can beat AA.
I started my poker career as an exclusive tournament player, and many years ago I made the conscious decision to switch to cash games. This change is an ongoing process, and I have been successful in resisting tournaments that I don’t feel are a value for my bankroll and my game.
The point I’m trying to make is that immediately after winning a tournament is the worst time to make the decision to play more tournaments. You’ll probably make the decision based on all the wrong reasons. You need to make a conscious decision about how many and which tournaments you want to play, and you need to make that decision at a time when you can make it consciously and without letting your emotions get in the way. (Hint: the beginning of a year is a great time to make these planning decisions.)
Make your decision, be aware of the reasons that led you to it, and move on. Losing a pot with an Ace-K shouldn't change how you play the next time you're dealt them, and winning a tournament shouldn't change how you make decisions about whether or not to play in such tournaments.
Author: Andrew Brokos
Translated and adapted from the original: Don't Gamble on Multi-Table Tournaments
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