R
Rational Madman
Legend
Platinum Level
Whether or not IQ is really intelligence or simply one form of intelligence, there clearly are smarter and dumber people on Earth. I am not saying that the smartest will win the most in poker but they definitely won't lose as much and not nearly as often as the less intelligent players.
Let's first address the classic line that I hear from tournament defenders: You lose less because you can't lose more than your buy-in. While this is true, what they fail to see is that in cash games your bad beats are far more rapidly made up for with your consistent wins as bad beats happen only minority of times. Also if bets get huge, smarter players have the self control to fold a really great hand because the raise is getting to an amount where they wouldn't want to engage without the nuts.
Self control and having good read on players (as well as basic understanding of hand probability) are why the idea of only losing the buy-in is negated because you win back faster what you lost if you're a smart cash game player.
Tournaments are unfair on smart players because the luck later on means no matter how well you played so far, you can get knocked out due to big stacks going full loose aggressive and you know you can't win back what you lost, like you could in a cash game. On the other hand, this attracts the more foolish players because they know they can beat smarter players as the minimum bet increases meaning that the ones who took dumb risks earlier on now have the stack size to bully the smart players into all or nothing situations to tilt them into a high risk scenario.
Let's first address the classic line that I hear from tournament defenders: You lose less because you can't lose more than your buy-in. While this is true, what they fail to see is that in cash games your bad beats are far more rapidly made up for with your consistent wins as bad beats happen only minority of times. Also if bets get huge, smarter players have the self control to fold a really great hand because the raise is getting to an amount where they wouldn't want to engage without the nuts.
Self control and having good read on players (as well as basic understanding of hand probability) are why the idea of only losing the buy-in is negated because you win back faster what you lost if you're a smart cash game player.
Tournaments are unfair on smart players because the luck later on means no matter how well you played so far, you can get knocked out due to big stacks going full loose aggressive and you know you can't win back what you lost, like you could in a cash game. On the other hand, this attracts the more foolish players because they know they can beat smarter players as the minimum bet increases meaning that the ones who took dumb risks earlier on now have the stack size to bully the smart players into all or nothing situations to tilt them into a high risk scenario.