Lheticus
Legend
Silver Level
Several times, I've heard some thoughts bandied about on the concept of playing to win the tournament or playing to make the money in the tournament--differences between the two of them strategically, stylistically, etc. I haven't really heard much on circumstances--when it is good to do one or the other, so I thought I'd put in my proverbial two cents.
I feel that nearly all the time, you should play to cash. Going for first place is all well and good, but if in doing so you make moves that routinely cause you to hit the rail before reaching the money where you would have had a legitimate shot had you played more conservative, going for #1 to the exclusion of all possible profitable outcomes strikes me as impractical and prideful. If you have such a prodigious bankroll that you can afford to enter a tournament solely for the purpose of pride, well, good on you, but as for the other 99% of us, well...when I enter a poker tournament, I feel my sole objective should be to get more money out of it than I put in to it, and everything else should be immaterial--including winning the entire tournament. If that seems to have a chance to happen anyway, that's great, but it should never be my actual objective. Many times, I have difficulty following my own advice and make dumb plays, but I never stop working on it.
However, there is one circumstance where I believe playing to win is appropriate--namely, in tournaments where the stakes are micro enough that if you make the money and don't make the final table and/or win the tournament, the amount you gain for your efforts is infinitesimal. If I enter a tournament for $1.10 online, in some tournaments with large fields, making the money on the bottom rung of the pay ladder would net me something like $1.20--and the tournament will have possibly gone on for an hour and a half or more by that point. An hour and a half for 10 cents? Not exactly time well spent. Two hours and thirty minutes to make the final table and get something like $7? Now we're getting somewhere.
I welcome anything anyone has to add to this/say about this.
From my pocket to your brains,
--Lheticus
I feel that nearly all the time, you should play to cash. Going for first place is all well and good, but if in doing so you make moves that routinely cause you to hit the rail before reaching the money where you would have had a legitimate shot had you played more conservative, going for #1 to the exclusion of all possible profitable outcomes strikes me as impractical and prideful. If you have such a prodigious bankroll that you can afford to enter a tournament solely for the purpose of pride, well, good on you, but as for the other 99% of us, well...when I enter a poker tournament, I feel my sole objective should be to get more money out of it than I put in to it, and everything else should be immaterial--including winning the entire tournament. If that seems to have a chance to happen anyway, that's great, but it should never be my actual objective. Many times, I have difficulty following my own advice and make dumb plays, but I never stop working on it.
However, there is one circumstance where I believe playing to win is appropriate--namely, in tournaments where the stakes are micro enough that if you make the money and don't make the final table and/or win the tournament, the amount you gain for your efforts is infinitesimal. If I enter a tournament for $1.10 online, in some tournaments with large fields, making the money on the bottom rung of the pay ladder would net me something like $1.20--and the tournament will have possibly gone on for an hour and a half or more by that point. An hour and a half for 10 cents? Not exactly time well spent. Two hours and thirty minutes to make the final table and get something like $7? Now we're getting somewhere.
I welcome anything anyone has to add to this/say about this.
From my pocket to your brains,
--Lheticus