Introduction to Tournament Poker

I myself am more of a cash game player, but due to the increase in demand for tournament strategy articles (and because it’s nice to take a break from grinding every now and then) I decided to go play some tournaments for a change. This article is meant as an introduction to some of the basics of tournament poker.

Game selection

Just like with cash games, a good game selection is very important when it comes to playing tournaments. Take into account your bankroll requirements for playing MTT’s, the blind structure and the level of opponents you will have to deal with. I started playing tournaments with buy-ins of 1% of my total bankroll on the same site I play cash

games on. These were predominantly Sit&Go’s with 45 or 90 players. I then started playing the $4.40, 180-player Sit&Go’s on PokerStars because many of the forum members were playing them and because they are ideal for multi-tabling. There is a new one starting up about every 10-15 minutes, making it easy to play between 8 and 10 on one night. Furthermore, these tournaments offer a nice payout for the top-spots, which is good for us, seeing as we are always playing for first place (and not to just finish in the money and double our buy-in). These tournaments also don’t take very long, usually about 4 hours, so you don’t have to start playing endless sessions and are still pretty fresh towards the end of the tournament. The blind structure is also relatively good so at least these tournament don’t all end up being a total crapshoot.

ROI and ITM%

ROI (Return On Investment) is a measure of calculating your winnings when playing poker tournaments. In cash games you do this by calculating your winrate. Simply put, your ROI is your total winnings, divided by the total of all your buy-ins, converted into a percentage. Lets say you play a total of 50 donkament Sit&Go’s like the ones mentioned above. You win one, come 5th once and 12th once. In total you now spent 50 x 4.40 on buy-ins (which is equal to $220) and you won $216 + $47 + $9 = $272. Your ROI is therefore (272-220) / 220 = 0.236, or 23.6%.

Luckily you won’t have to keep track of your ROI yourself, as there are various sites like Sharkscope and OPR that calculate not only your ROI but also that of your opponents. This can be quite handy when you are interested to see how much experience one of your opponents at the final table really has.

An “In The Money %” comes in handy to see how good you are performing. For a 180 player Sit&Go, where the top 18 get paid, you would be expected to make it into the money 10% of the time. Hopefully, however, you are a little better than the average player and make the money more often than that.

In order to make good use of these statistics, however, you need to make sure to have a relatively large sample of tournaments. For example, you would need to play at least 100 donkaments before the statistics give you a proper indication about your game. If you want to be really accurate you will however need many more than that.

Harrington’s M-ratio

When playing No Limit tournament poker, your “M” is an indication about the health of your stack in relation to the blinds and antes. It is defined as the total number of chips in your stack, divided by the total cost you incur during one orbit. Lets say you are sitting full-ring and the blinds are 100/200, with antes of 25 and you have a stack of 5,000. Your “M” would now be 5,000/(100 + 200 + 10×25) = 5,000 / 550 = 9. This means that, if you don’t play a single hand, you will be out of chips after 9 orbits.

You M is important when it comes to choosing the appropriate strategy. When you have a large M (greater than 20), you can pretty much play the way you want (be aggressive and pick up pots or wait for strong hands) without getting into a lot of trouble. The more your M value decreases, the sooner you will have to start winning some pots before the blinds completely eat away at your remaining stack.

We can classify the different M values into 5 groups like in the table below. For each zone you can also see the optimal strategy for that specific M.