Playing the Odds in Tournaments

by: Lou Krieger©

I received a lot of favorable feedback about my recent column, 'Playing the Odds'. This piece expands on it by discussing the impact of odds in tournaments. Next issue we’ll look at implied odds.

Tournament players have additional factors to consider when deciding whether to fold or continue drawing. Even when the pot will offset the odds against making a hand, the risk of elimination sometimes overshadows any potential rewards.

Because of this, folding is often advisable even when the relationship between pot odds and the odds against making your hand are favorable.

If you are faced with a bet that puts you all-in if you call, your entire tournament life is at stake if you lose, while winning an all-in confrontation seldom comes with any guarantees. You might not even make it to the money. Tournament decisions must often be made with an eye to your relative position against the entire field. That’s never an issue in a cash game, when all that's at stake is winning or losing the money wagered on a given hand.

Tournament players also have to consider the relationship between their chip count and the cost to play one complete orbit of poker.

Early in a tournament every player usually has a very large amount of chips relative to the blinds. In a tournament where players begin with $1,500 in chips and face blinds of $10-20, it costs only $30 to play one full orbit of poker, and each player has 50 times that in chips. Because each player has lots of chips compared to the blinds, the early stages of tournaments can be played much like cash games.

Draws to straights and flushes can be played now although they will become unplayable later on in the event, when the blinds have escalated and a player may only have four, five, or ten times the cost of a round of poker.

Playing a drawing hand in those circumstances is probably going to involve going all-in and risking your entire tournament life. It’s usually a lot better to play a made hand than a draw when tournament survival is at stake.

Nevertheless, there are situations where you have to risk your entire tournament life on marginal hands. If you have a relatively small stack of chips, you can’t afford to sit and wait for a big pocket pair. They don’t come around often enough. That means going all-in with as little as a lone ace, especially when no one else has voluntarily entered the pot yet, and you still have enough chips to make someone think twice about calling your all-in bet.

In these situations, calculating outs is not terribly important. What matters most is deciding whether you believe your all-in bet stands a good chance of winning the pot right there, coupled with your chances of winning if you pair your ace.

Pot odds do become important in tournaments when you have a hand with a draw attached to it. You might flop a pair with a draw, giving you two ways to win. When that happens, you can’t ignore those additional outs that your draw offers. You might pick up a draw while holding two cards bigger than the board. If you pair one of your overcards, you can win without ever having to make your draw.

If you take one thing away from this column, it’s this: Recognize that the relationship between the size of the pot and the odds against making your hand isn’t always as significant in tournament poker as it is in a cash game.

In a cash game, each hand is a world unto itself, played in a vacuum of sorts. In tournament poker, each hand must be analyzed and assessed in terms of chip counts, relative stack size compared to the cost of playing another orbit of hands, where you stand in relationship to your opponent’s chip count, and whether playing and winning will move you up the pay ladder.

You’ve got to take a different look at things when making a play or fold decision in a tournament, and that look is much broader than it is in a cash game.