Posted by Bond18 | Filed under Bond18
As much as I enjoy grinding online, it doesn’t exactly give me a lot of material to write about. After so long of being exhausted by forcing myself to get up at 11am I’m now exhausted by forcing myself to get up at 10am, though it’s much easier to get to sleep early in Melbourne than Vegas. All I’ve been doing for the last couple of days is waking up, putting in my session, then relaxing in the evening as a result of being drained from my traveling.
The online tournament scene has changed a bit since I last played heavily. I’m seeing a lot more people aware of +cEV shoves and open shoving a considerably wider range between 11-16 BB’s. I’m also seeing a number of guys who three months ago were unheard of playing quite well and aggressively. People also seem a bit more stack size aware than three months ago, with less blatant mistakes being made at the higher stakes tournaments. However, things are still clearly very profitable for the expert tournament players and there’s a larger variety of tournaments than ever.
I’ve been talking to my friend Luckychewy about learning heads-up cash games in order to improve my deep stack play. I think that there’s only so much you can learn about poker through playing predominately MTT’s, and in order to take your game to the next level you have to force yourself into new and more challenging situations. I think heads-up cash is perfect for improvement since it constantly puts you in difficult situations where hand reading and predicting your opponents thought process becomes integral.
One of the difficulties in improving your tournament game is that many of the tournament situations you find yourself in are on stack sizes below 40 BB’s. As a result a vast majority of your decision making comes to down to understanding ranges and equity in pre-flop situations instead of more elaborate post flop and deep stacked situations. Although there is clearly more to tournament play than those factors they’re the two that get exercised the most while making deep runs in tournaments.
It’s no secret that for the most part, guys who spend the majority of their time playing cash end up being ‘better poker players’. That is to say you can normally take a cash player and put him in an equivalent stakes tournament and he’ll be +EV. Meanwhile take a predominately MTT player and stick him in an equivalent stakes cash game and he’ll often be out of his league (unless he’s spent time working on his cash game previously.) The fact is cash forces you into a more difficult and elaborate level of decision making. That’s not to say tournaments aren’t hard or tournament players are bad, simply that tournaments require a somewhat difficult skill set. The major leaks you do see in cash players in tournaments is when the stacks fall below 30 BB’s and they have minimal experience playing them, as well as problems with shoving ranges.
Still, I feel in order to become a complete player learning both are a must. On top of this I also think there’s considerable value to learning mixed games, as PLO seems to be the new high stakes game of choice and all anyone says about PLO is “The games are so sick.” I’ve spent the last two years of my life doing everything I can to improve my tournament game, and at this point I think I’ve hit a plateau. Even though cash games feel more like a job to me, I believe the only way I’ll ever truly take my tournament game to the next level is if I force myself into unchartered waters.
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