Poker School

Tournaments or Cash?

(Poker is poker. It's a simple statement, but true. Whether you're playing cash games or tournaments, a flush beats a straight, and the strongest hand at showdown will take the pot. But it doesn't follow that a successful tournament player is going to clean up at the cash tables, and vice versa. Tournaments and cash games are different beasts and a lot of players - even top pros - will make a decision early on to specialise in one or the other. What you choose to play should be based on a number of different factors, including your playing style and ambitions. Are you playing poker recreationally or do you potentially see it as a long-term career choice. Are you in it for the glory or for the money? Tournaments definitely offer less financial risk in the short-term. As long as you're not playing a rebuy tournament, you know exactly how much money you can lose. Cash games, on the other hand, offer effectively limitless losses or wins, with each hand playing up to the amount of chips you've got in front of you on the table.

Cash games come with much less variance though. Each cash hand you play is an independent entity and over time, and thousands of hands, luck should even out and your results will reflect your level of skill. It's a lot easier to know if you can make it as a cash player. If your bankroll's going up, and you're beating a game, then you're a winning player. If you move up a level and start losing, you can just drop down again. Game selection is crucial and you should always be looking to play in a game where you're better than the others at the table.

You can't choose where you sit in a tournament, but you can choose which tournaments you play in, and this should be dictated by your bankroll. It's also true that you need a lot more luck to win tournaments, where you can play perfectly, and still lose. And lose. And lose. Even the very best tournament players can go for long periods of time without a major cash, and if poker's your main source of income, these swings can be hard to deal with. Tournaments can also be a drain on your time. If you're playing big tournaments you need to be able to devote a huge amount of time if you go deep consistently - you can't just dip in and out to suit your lifestyle as you can with cash games.

On the flip side, tournaments offer you the chance to win life-changing sums of money and get huge public exposure for little risk. Peter Eastgate, a 22-year-old Dane won the 2008 WSOP Main Event, and pocketed over $9m for a relatively modest outlay of just $10,000. If you're after the glory and possibly even a sponsorship deal, then you need to make your mark in the tournament world.)

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