Multi-Table Tournaments: Winning vs. Cashing

I was watching a circuit event from the 2005 WSOP last night on ESPN Classic. Talking to an interviewer during the event, Antonio " the Magician" Esfandiari said something that stuck in my head and got me thinking hard about my own play. His comment was something along the lines of, “To win a tournament, you have to win all the chips.”

It blew my mind.

Profound, isn’t it? In order to win a tournament, you have to win the chips of every other player in the tournament. All of them. Large field, small field – doesn’t matter. The point is that by the end, you must have accumulated 100% of the chips that everyone started with.

Okay, you’re probably not as wowed by this as I was. I’ll admit, on the surface it’s a pretty simple concept. But it made me totally rethink the way I look at tournaments.

For a while, I wondered why my peers were consistently making final tables and I was only barely cashing. But Esfandiari’s remark made me think about some of the arguments over poker hands I’ve recently had with Billy. They have all had different particulars, but what they share in common is this: Billy advocates getting all your chips in when you’re ahead, even if you’re only slightly favored. This play has high variance, winning big when your hand holds up and losing big when you get bad beat. I, on the other hand, often argue for lower variance plays … plays that involve more calling/folding until more information is available.

An example might clarify this a little. Say you’re holding pocket Kings, in the middle stages of a tournament. Naturally, you raise before the flop. The player acting immediately after you makes a significant re-raise (maybe to 1/3 of your stack), and everyone else folds back to you. You know for a fact that she is holding Ace-King of spades, because she exposes her cards to you. Don’t ask why she does this, just pretend that’s what she does. So what do you do? You know you’re ahead in the hand (about 2:1), as your opponent cannot hit a King and win. But if the flop comes with an Ace, or 2 to 3 spades, you’re in trouble.

Billy would likely tell you to move all-in here, or at least to make a big re-raise. You’re getting your money in while you have the best hand, and this should make you a profit in the long run, right? Okay, fair enough.

I have generally argued that a call here might save you some chips. If the flop comes with three spades, or an ace, you can bow out gracefully and live to fight another hand. Not possible if you had moved all in before the flop. If the flop isn’t threatening to your hand, you’ll be closer to a 6:1 favorite, and you can make your big move here and take down the (admittedly smaller) pot. My general reasoning is that it is better to make decisions based upon as much information as possible, rather than just getting it all in while you’re ahead.

So who’s right? I think the answer to that question, like most questions in poker, is that it depends. In this case, it depends what you’re going for in the tournament. If your goal is to win the whole shebang, then Billy’s advice is most certainly the appropriate course of action. If, however, it’s more important to you that you make it to the money rounds, then I would take the more conservative route.

The bottom line is, I’ve been getting exactly the results I’ve been playing for. I enter tournaments day after day, drooling over the fat first place prizes. Then I come out and play like I don’t even want them! The way I’ve played certain hands has produced the outcomes I should have expected – cashing often but rarely making final tables and never winning. What I learned from Esfandiari is that if I want to win a tournament, I am going to have to aggressively attack my opponents’ chip stacks. It will result in fewer cashes, but when I do cash, the wins will be bigger.

I think what I'll do is try some combination of our two formulas. Play to survive for a while, and let the donks blow their stacks to the better players. Afterwards, while others are still playing conservatively (read: "weakly") I'll start raking in their chips with more aggressive moves.

I'll keep you posted on how things go.