Royal Flush Radio

5 Poker Tournament Myths Way Too Many Players Believe

June 6, 2017 by Miikka Anttonen #3

You Have to Play for the Win Every Hand

This one is a real pet peeve of mine. It’s one you hear thrown around a lot, especially from players who just punted their stack in the early-mid stages of live tournaments.
These players build huge stacks, and then they give it all away in some ridiculous hand that they decided they needed to win at all costs. Their explanation?
“I had to play for the win.”
There’s a fitting poker catchphrase to counter the argument that is, in fact, very much true:
“You can’t win a poker tournament on the first day, you can only lose it”
Bingo! It’s impossible to win a WSOP event on day one, and it’s not your job to terminate everyone. You’re not Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Your job is to play solid, fundamentally strong poker, making exploitative adjustments against your opponents as information presents itself. Sometimes you need to play hyper-aggressively, but not because you have to play for the win.
Simple logic reveals the flaw of this “play for the win every hand” strategy:
Let’s say you’re playing in a $1,000 buy-in, 1000-player tournament with a 10,000-chip starting stack. It’s late on day one, and you’re on the river after missing a flush draw.
There’s 30,000 chips in the pot and you have another 30,000 chips behind. You’re pretty sure that your opponent has a made hand of some kind. Whether or not you should shove all-in depends on a lot of factors, but ”I need to play for the win” isn’t one of them.
Consider: There are 10 million chips in play, and thus the final table average will be slightly north of 1,000,000 chips. The blinds will likely be around 20,000/40,000.
The 30,000 pot in front of you is worth less than one big blind at the final table.
You absolutely don’t need to win this pot in order to win the tournament. But if you get called and lose, you definitely aren’t going to win the tournament.

But Sometimes, “Playing for the Win” is the Correct Approach

The “playing for the win” mentality is a lot more viable when the “win” is within reach.
Taking some risks, even big ones, is justifiable in spots like the final two tables of the WSOP Main Event. If you can get that chiplead on the final table bubble, you’re going to be able to pad your stack by stealing blinds and antes from the shorter stacks. If someone justified a big, unsuccessful bluff in such a spot with “I had to play for the win”, I may nod in agreement(depending on the hand).
Similarly, sometimes you need to take a stand against the chipleader to avoid blinding out.
But these situations with big money at stake that always require extreme caution; it’s a fine line between calculated risks and kamikaze moves. The truth is that sometimes it’s your job to get 2^nd or 3^rd in a tournament (the case of the Australian lady is a good example).

As a tournament player, you need to learn to embrace payjumping as much as you embrace those rare wins. You can’t win them all, and it’s how you handle the big picture that determines how successful you’ll eventually become.