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The G-Spot: Same Situation - Different Game Format

March 26, 2008

Same Situation; Different Game Format; Different Decision

Texas Hold’em, seven card stud, Omaha, razz, Mexican poker, blind maniac’s bluff - the list of playable poker variants extends pretty much as far as your imagination can take you with a deck of cards. And the same can be said for the number of ways each poker variant can be played: cash games and several different tournament formats.

When playing in a cash game, the chips on the table are directly equivalent to cash (a $1 chip represents $1), and you may cash out or add more chips at any time. Generally, chips are not directly equivalent to cash in a tournament. You can not just take the payout for first place and divide by the number of chips in play to find out how much each chip is worth (the exception being if you are playing a winner-take-all tournament). When playing in a tournament, your goal is to maximize your monetary expected value.

At a given time in a tournament, your probability of finishing in each place will be a strong function of the relative stack sizes. And the monetary expected value associated with each stack distribution is a function of the payout structure. When evaluating the monetary expected value of a tournament decision, you need to evaluate the distribution of possible stack distributions that will result from a particular move.

For some payout structures (particularly top-heavy ones) you won’t mind taking risks that are just barely above neutral chip expected value. For other payout structures (like the relatively flat ones found in satellites and many single table tournaments) you will prefer to avoid big confrontations with marginal edges, looking to keep pots small in such situations and folding if action gets too heavy.

Poker is a game of situations, but those situations are not just defined by the cards and how your opponents play. They are also defined by the structure of the game you are playing in. You can have the same cards and be playing against an opponent who plays identically regardless of format, and optimal play can dictate taking completely different lines of play depending on the format. Those who say that it’s tough to be good at cash games, single table tournaments, and multi-table tournaments tend to be those who play the same regardless of the poker format they are playing. Account for the game format, and you will be able to succeed in whatever form of poker you’re playing.

Tony Guerrera is the author of Killer Poker By The Numbers and coauthor of Killer Poker Shorthanded (with John Vorhaus). Visit him at www.killerev.com.

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