Tournaments

This year I have played quite a lot of tournaments.  I would esimate this to be about five times as many as I did last year and something like 400 tournaments altogether.  Not a lot really, certainly nowhere near enough to count as sample where I could judge my tournament skill level.  I didn't actually record my results in Holdem Manager so I have to estimate these results based on rough judgements and looking at sharkscope and stuff like that.  I think I am down about $10k in them this year.

Obviously this is frustrating because it sucks to lose.  I would put this loss down to 30% poor tournament play on my part, and 70% down to running bad.  After all, I could just bink at $10k score next week and suddenly I'm break even, bink a $20k score and I'm a significant winner.  That's how these tourneys work you see.

My reasoning for playing more tournaments was mostly just because I wanted the feeling of winning one, manouvering my way through a large field, dodging some bullets Phil Hellmuth style and ultimately winning a significant amount of money.  If I do ever achieve this I know all the frustrations of busting over and over again will be worth it.  Winning my first ever tournament, just over $4k in a PKR one, was a really nice feeling even though I have won this amount of money in a day at cash games several times before.

Anyway, here's some things that come to mind from my experiences of playing tournaments this year:

• Even though people recognise that tournament variance is very high, most still underestimate it
• Following on from above point a bit, tournament pro's couldn't have run below expectation early in their career because otherwise they wouldn't have pursued this form of poker.  There's just no way you can enjoy tournament poker if you are running bad at them.
• People don't really fold much in tournaments.  This is a recent thing I have noticed and may just be a small sample size thing that doesn't accurately reflect the state of the games but villains just haven't been folding both pre and post flop.  Examples include guy 3x/calling off 20bbs with K6o and another one where villain (with an FTOPs jersey) called me down with 77 vs my 55 on 258A9  after his flop c-bet was called by myself and another person and I led turn.  This was also early in the tournament so about 100bbs effective.
• People don't really bluff in tournaments.  I think regs focus on tournament survival a lot so mostly arn't willing to bluff off their entire stack even if its a good bluff and fish don't want to ruin their nights fun by busting early.  I get fooled by this so often.  "Why would they 3x pot shove the turn with a big hand?" I tell myself.  "My top pair must be good.....oh fuck they have middle set........they must have got scared when the back door flush draw hit".  You see these massive bets a lot, and they are so rarely weak.

The above comments don't really mean much because I'm very far from being someone that is qualified to advise on tournaments.  The unfortunate thing is I don't really feel like I have improved much at tournaments this year so it's basically $10k down the drain.  I probably have got better in some ways, just not in ways I can consciously think of.

Next year I do plan to play more of these god-for-saken things in the hope of improving my results.  There is some stuff I could do away from the tables to help this happen like watch tournament videos or read Bill Chen's maths poker book.  Unfortunately both of these are painfully boring.  I probably need to use more motivational tools like the photo below:

MUST.BE.NICE.