In order to determine your strategy for a poker tournament, you need to consider the payout structure, of which there are four general types:1) A normal distributed prize pool in a multi-table tournament (MTT) where 10% of the field gets paid and the majority of the money is in the top three spots.
2) Winner-take-all multi-table tournaments, where only the winner gets a prize—and it’s big.
3) Super-satellite-type events where all the prizes are exactly the same. For example, the top ten players might get a seat in a bigger tournament.
4) Sit-n-go tournaments (SNGs) where the top three spots divide the prize pool 50%, 30%, and 20%.
When you’re looking to maximize your earning potential, it’s important to understand how to adjust your strategy to the different payout schedules. So let’s look at how your play should change in these different payout environments.
Taking the first case first, an MTT with a prize pool distributed over 10% of the field, the big mistake most people make is that they play to cash. The problem is, if you play merely to last long enough to win some money, you’ve greatly reduced your chances of winning the tournament. Whenever you play very conservatively in a tournament, you reduce your chances of winning, because accumulating all the chips requires the acceptance of some risk. On the flip side, when you play to win by increasing your risk, you reduce the chances that you’ll place in the money. You need to weigh these opposing strategies against the reward for each.
"Merely cashing in a tournament is generally a breakeven proposition; you get your money back and that's all."
Merely cashing in a tournament is generally a breakeven proposition; you get your money back and that’s all. But when you win, the prize is often more than 100 times your entry fee. This means that winning is 100 times better than cashing. So in a typical MTT, you should always play to win rather than to break even. Expressed a different way, you should be willing to greatly reduce your chances of cashing in order to increase your chances of winning, since winning brings such a big reward.
Now let’s take a super satellite with a flat payout structure; all the prizes are equal. Here there’s no difference between cashing and winning—they both pay exactly the same. When the prizes are the same no matter what place you come in, 20th or 1st, it no longer makes sense to take extra risk to try to accumulate a ton of chips. To increase your chance of winning a super satellite, you pay the price of decreasing your chance of cashing, which is now the prime objective.
This mathematical fact is so compelling that if I know I have enough chips to cash in a tournament with a flat payout structure, I’ll fold aces. In fact, I probably won’t even look at my cards, since nothing I might see would induce me to take any risk at all. Of course, you’ll only do this if you’re certain you have enough chips to place in the money. The point is, once you accumulate above-average chips in this kind of tournament, you’re definitely compelled to play more conservatively than in a tournament with a normal payout structure.
"In a SnG, first is only 2.5 times greater than 3rd."
Falling between these two cases is a single-table tournament. A typical 10-handed sit-n-go has a payout structure of 50% for 1st, 30% for 2nd, and 20% for 3rd. Notice that this has some elements from each of the two previous tournament structures. The payout isn’t flat as in a super satellite, so there’s definitely a bigger reward for coming in 1st, as opposed to just cashing and coming in 3rd. However, the difference between 3rd and 1st isn’t nearly as great as the difference in a normal MTT where first is often 100 times greater than just making it into the money. In a SNG, first is only 2.5 times greater than 3rd. Now there’s some reward for increasing your risk to increase your chances of winning, but not a lot. The strategy here is to play to cash, then gamble for first. Because cashing is almost as good as winning in this case, you shouldn’t hurt your chances of cashing by playing for a win from the start. But once you’ve accomplished the first objective of getting into the money, you should transition to riskier poker to optimize (almost for free) your chances of winning.
The last kind of payout structure is the most extreme, where a MTT or SNG is winner take all. In this type of tournament, gambling and risk-taking are king—if there’s no difference between coming in last place or 2nd place, why play for anything but 1st? You should take many more risks than normal, gambling to try to pick up as many chips as possible and not worrying one little bit about lasting, because when you have to win to be paid, just lasting gets you nowhere.
How you play a poker tournament is a balancing act between risk and reward. When there’s little reward in the payout structure for risky behavior, as in a super satellite, your strategy should be much more conservative. When there’s a lot of reward for risky behavior, as in a winner-take-all structure, you should gamble all over the place. The way you optimize the risk-reward balance is understanding the tournament’s payout structure, then playing accordingly.
Annie Duke
WPT Article
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