I made a thread a few days back about how silly tournament players are and it got all the tournament diehards to have a hissy fit and call me insecure.
This is understandable though, after all why would I expect a rational intelligent response from the side lacking these traits?
Now I shall
fully explain why tournament poker is ultimately a futile invention and why those endorsing it are playing against their profit.
So, let's say you go to a 9 man sng, play real safe try to survive to the payouts. Now, unless you're at like a 10 cent or equivalent level of stakes where the literal fish of the fish go to just raise big and feel zero shame or guilt as they don't lose anything, you're not going to just be able to 'fold to the end' on a regular basis'. Yes, you can actually fold and profit on a tiny stakes level as a SnG tournament player but if making 1 dollar per hour is your aim in life then I feel terribly sorry for you.
In 'proper poker' where there's still fish and donks (I define donks as fish who use pre-flop aggression to make the sharks scared to participate, 'fish' are the more passive ones like the call station type or the type who are only LAG post-flop) you will find that you can't just fold to the end and that the final 3 out of 9 etc. will catch onto what you're trying to do and will raise you all-in preflop every hand at times laughing hard if their 5-7 beats your Kings and all that time you spent folding resulted in you gaining $0.00.
Now we begin to see two issues with tournaments:
1) In terms of time to money, there's very little proportionality or ability to use your own actions to increase or decrease your earnings per X amount of time. Why do I say this? Ultimately, even an Ivey/Hellmuth/Dwan/Negreanu tier player isn't going to influence the pace of a tournament, the skill is in accepting that you are a slave to the tournament's natural pace due to factors like blind increasing and also factors like the pre-flop aggression of your enemies causing you to not be able to play your Ace queen as even an ace nine can make all the time you spent lasting that long come to nothing if a 9 shows up.
2) As tournaments hit the ending, even if you did scrape payouts by playing like the TAG coward you are, there is basically 1% chance maximum of you ever getting above the bottom end of payouts, perhaps you'll get to the payout level just above bottom in an MTT if the fish kill each other off or you get aces or something. Why is this? Because the amount of big blinds one can afford at the end is only a good amount if they played like quite a loose idiot for a large portion of the game beforehand. How do I know? Do you think I didn't try my hand at tournament poker? I am extremely good at it, yet I still lose it regularly and find that heads up as in 1st vs 2nd is always pure luck 0% skill.
Now, let's look at those 2 things I just mentioned in cash games and explain why no one with a well/high-functioning IQ is going to play tournaments instead.
1) So, something I didn't mention before is that if you try to get 'faster ending' tournaments you even further enable less intelligent aggro players to get you out due to how fast the minimum bet increases forcing you to play just as dumb. This is actually true also in cash games in terms of seat amount, I never ever would advise anyone (and yes I am very perplexed why anyone opts this) to pick the 6 or 5 man tables in any poker site's cash games options over the 9 or 10 man table alternatives. Big table size means two different things both which benefit you immensely if you think long term. We all get periods of low variance, you know those 16 hands where you get 3-10, 5-4 etc? Yeah, we all get those periods, and what do you do? Correct shark, you just fold them and cry. That's totally fine to do, that's why cash games are so great because you have zero pressure to play a single one of those hands as there's no blind increase blackmailing you to take risks you otherwise wouldn't want to. So on a bigger table, this means losing less via blinds assuming that the table isn't less than half full for the duration of the folds. The second benefit of big-table cash-gaming is that you can hide your nut-hits so beautifully well and tilt people to the max with your surprise attacks, this works even better if you play a tiny bit loose here and there to make people underestimate the significance of you reraising. Let me explain this in more obvious terms; unless you are in first position (in which case the only way to pull this off is to check and hope the ones after you don't also check), you can let someone else raise, you call them or reraise the minimum amount hoping that someone after you then is going to think they have better than you and raise back, NOW YOU GO ALLIN and one of the two is bound to think 'OH NO YOU DONT TAKE THIS POT THAT EASILY' because you played as if you got semi-lucky and are hoping they both fear you except you actually hit fullhouse or something and used their aggression against themselves. This is near-impossible to pull off on 5/6 man tables where you are usually always ending up 1v1 in any hand where serious profit is to be made. In 1v1 hands, you can't mask your superstrength and have to raise big which allows the enemy to assess you better, you can't us others raising to trap someone like that which will mean you make less per hour guaranteed as your 'tricky' plays are always plays where your enemy has accurate assessment of your hands.
2) You know how in tournaments, all the people who played earlier like kamikaze donkeys are now running the show? Yeah, see tournaments are not for Buddhists they got no Karma whatsoever. You get unlucky once to these morons and you're out end of story. In cash games, psychos going all-in preflop are a goldmine if you stay long enough and endure hard enough. The more they lose to you, the more they want to take back from you. Once you win enough and know that they'll keep trying to take it from you in large chunks guess what you can do? There's a 'leave table' button
In cash games, bad players genuinely increase the profits of good/smart players due to one hand never 'knocking out' a person with any permanent sense. Of course, having the bankroll management to never walk in with 100% of your bankroll is a given and if you do this, then it becomes like a tournament where you can be permanently dominated by a donkey due to one bad hand, always be willing to buy-in at least 2 more times (so 3 buy-ins) as 2 bad beats is quite a plausible outcome before the reversal ensues.
