This article first appeared in the Nov/Dec 2012 issue of World Gaming magazine.
Playing poker tournaments online can be a frustrating experience, but the potential rewards are huge, so it is important to put everything in perspective.
Playing poker tournaments used to be totally different. The fields were so much smaller ten years ago. Most live tournaments outside the World Series of Poker were not much bigger than 100 runners. Even online tournament fields were calculated in the hundreds not the thousands.
Now when you look at online poker sites like PokerStars most of the big tournaments have thousands of runners. This means the playing field has changed and a more aggressive game is needed to win. The more aggressive the game, the greater the variance involved. It is obviously going to be much harder to win a tournament with 10,000 runners than a tournament with 100 runners. The news is not bad it’s just different, and you need to adjust.
Lets have a look at the math. If you play in 100 tournaments with 100 runners, cash in ten including winning two of them you would be well in front. If you play in 100 tournaments with 10,000 runners then even a really good player might easily not get close to winning one. Sure you might pick up a few small cashes but the problem is you have to play so many more tournaments to get that big result.
Now the good news is the rewards are so much bigger these days. We often see online tournaments offering guarantees of $1 million with buy-ins around $200. That is a huge prize pool to be involved in for a very small investment.
So how do you approach these types of tournaments? Well the basics are the same but there are some very important things you need to change. Firstly you have to be more proactive. In the old days the very best players could outclass a field of 100 runners without having to rely on getting lucky or surviving many coin flips. As long as they could avoid disaster or “getting unlucky” then they could go deep in the tournament.
In a tournament with 10,000 runners it is nearly impossible to win without defying the odds along the way. You are going to have to get lucky and you are going to have to come back from adversity when you receive unlucky breaks and bad beats.
So all this means you are going to need to be patient. Not patient within each tournament, but patient in terms of waiting for a big score. You’ll probably have to play many tournaments before that elusive payday comes, but when it does it will be huge.
After all, regardless of the number of starters there is only ever going to be one winner each tournament. Just remember the rewards are far greater the more runners there are. All you can do is play your best and make sure, when your number comes up and luck is on your side, you are good enough to take advantage of it.
