Tournament selection: The overlooked art form
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There have been more articles than I can count on game selection in cash games. It has been said this is the key to maximizing profits. Post-UIGEA it has been the key to many midlevel cash games pros’ very survival in online poker. A typical cash game player even has a bit of a ritual put together in how they go about selecting which games to play in. With all this talk of game selection you would think someone would put together some sort of offering in terms of tournament selection. However, very little exists out there. This article is my attempt at sharing with you the reader a simple system for selecting your tournament schedule.
In my opinion there are 4 basic components that comprise good tournament selection. These components are size of field, site dynamics, composition, and structure. There are also a couple lesser, but still relevant factors to consider that we will discuss alongside those primary factors.
The first concept we must understand when considering how to be most profitable in tournaments is field size. Tournament players must measure profit by maximum ROI over a decent sample size (excluding massive wins played above standard buyin level). If I win one tournament for $5k over the course of 100 tournaments and net $1500 it means nothing if I could have had a higher ROI and earned a higher total amount playing tournaments with smaller fields over the same number of tournaments. This brings us to the topic of field size. Field size is an extremely important factor in determining profitability. Larger fields offer potentially better ROIs. The caveat to this is that the players in all tournaments must be of an equivalent skill level. Knowing this we might hypothesize, “If I play larger fields then I will have a higher overall ROI”. While this is in theory likely to be true, the problem with using this hypothesis as our guide is that there may be drawbacks in terms of the player composition of larger field tournaments as well as possible personal stylistic disadvantages. One disadvantage may be as simple as becoming bored and playing less than optimal the longer we play.
The most important decision makers in deciding on what field size to play are your goals in poker and the size of your bankroll. If your goal is to have fun and the idea of having one huge score excites you then maybe playing huge fields is best for you. Do keep in mind however that if losing for a long time before you hit that one huge score will make poker too frustrating or unenjoyable then maybe huge fields aren’t the best way to go. If your goal is to be consistently profitable then smaller fields will probably work best. For most people a mixed strategy tends to be best. If you’re playing 5 tournaments a night then make one of those a huge field (1000+ players) and make the others more moderately sized tournaments (200-400 players). Remember the larger the fields, the worse the variance. If you decide to compose a schedule that is 80% large field mtt’s then expect to go to bed complaining of bad beats, pissed off that you didn’t win most nights - fields that large can often play like freeroll tournaments in some spots.
The second piece of the puzzle when it comes to tournament selection is room dynamics. When deciding which poker rooms to play at, you need to look at what kind of bankroll flexibility you will have. Ideally you will be able to choose from at least 3 sites to play on. This means you will need to spread your BR out in a way that will keep you playing on all 3 sites even when you are only winning on one of them in the short term. If you won’t have enough cash to do so and don’t have the flexibility to move cash quickly between sites then obviously your options are more limited. Once you’ve decided how many sites you will have the BR to play on you can move on to choosing those sites. The most important thing to consider is the quality of play. Sites like AP, Cake and more obscure sites will surely offer you the softest competition and ROIs consistently above 100% long term are actually still attainable. This level of ROI is very rarely attained over time on stars or ftp any more. Each site will have a general style of play that most of their players seem to fit within. For example, Pokerstars players tend to be very loose aggressive, where as Absolute players tend to be loose passive (otherwise known as calling stations). UB on the other hand offers a good number of weak tight opponents (commonly called rocks) in their deeper stacked tournaments that can be pushed out of pots more often than they should be. In the shallower stacked tourneys on UB the players can be a weird mix of rock and lagtard/station combo players who are a bit tough to handle at times. You should evaluate what style of play you play best against and strongly consider including sites that tend to have that type of player on them in your normal playing schedule.
The third major consideration is structure. UB offers players incredibly deep stacks and tons of levels so that when you get to a final table you will still have avg. stacks around 20 to 30BB’s in many of the larger buyin tournaments. AP on the other hand rarely offers a final table where stacks are greater than 10BB’s on average. Pokerstars and ftp fall in between with ftp offering a much stronger structure late than most sites. Smaller sites are worth investigating as well, like Cake (or Cake network sites Sportsbook or BetUS) Most players would think the easy answer to the question of what tournament structures do I want to play in is “whatever the tournaments with the best structure are I will play those.” That line of thinking borders on blatantly wrong. If you are a top player who has sustained exceptionally high ROIs across all sites you play and you are patient and have a great feel for stack size considerations then the tourneys with the best structure may be ideal for you. If you like to play super aggressive and struggle to fold big hands when other players may have bigger hands then it is actually better for you to play tournaments with worse structures. Remember, everyone plays under the same structure in a given tournament and you may simply be able to play weaker structures better simply because your style favors those structures. If you are an aggressive player and aren’t currently a winning player then it also may be best for you to play tournaments with worse structures. Obviously if you aren’t a winning player because you are too tight then the opposite is true and deeper structures are better for your style.
The final piece of the puzzle when determining tournament selection is composition. By composition I am speaking of the type and quality of players in the tournaments you are playing. This is somewhat closely tied to the site dynamics in that composition tends to be pretty similar in all tournaments on a given site. Obviously if you are trying to make a profit from poker you’d want tournaments with the fewest professionals, semi-pros or experienced players and largest number of amateurs. Tournaments with this sort of composition are found on AP, UB, Cake, bodog and other obscure sites most often. If you are playing because you enjoy a challenge and aren’t as interested in profitability then playing solely at Pokerstars is a must for you since stars offers the toughest competition on the net and typically the lowest ROIs for winning players on average.
Hopefully you found this all informative. This article offers you a blueprint for determining what factors to consider in developing a tournament schedule. What this doesn’t do is blatantly tell you which sites you should play or shouldn’t play. There is no one size fits all in poker and the same goes for tournament selection.
