Mixing Cash Games with Poker Tournaments

There will always be strong attractions for all poker players to try their hand at different forms of online poker. Cash game players will fancy playing the odd poker tournament every now and again and vice versa. On the surface then it may seem that there is absolutely nothing wrong in this at all. But on closer inspection then we suddenly start to see a far darker side to mixing these two forms of poker.

It all has to do with the mindset of each player in each type of poker. The successful cash game player may be someone who is very good at calculating equity and has tremendous patience, self control and discipline. He is constantly buying in for the maximum and every time that his stack drops below the maximum, he is constantly topping that up.

He will probably be multi-tabling if he is an online player and if he is playing full-ring then he may be a tight playing rock and playing that way could be very profitable indeed. But this style of play may be productive in cash games and even in the early stages of poker tournaments when the blind to stack ratio is high. However that situation quickly evaporates when the blinds become so high that the average stack is just a few big blinds and the only remaining move is an all-in move.

This is why tournament poker players need to gamble, only one player can win that tournament and when you consider the number of hands that an average tournament player gets dealt then they simply haven’t got the time to get lucky in terms of being dealt enough premium hands.

You have to gamble to win large field poker tournaments and you have to gamble early enough and not wait until its too late and you are desperately short. But cash game regulars tend to sit and wait until its too late and this is why switching constantly between tournament poker and cash games can be very difficult. Regular tournament players when they play cash games tend not to slow down fast enough and end up losing their chips in situations where cash game regulars wouldn’t.

Once again this is one of mindset and your average tournament player can easily become the fish food in ring games. Also it is worth mentioning that each one of them has their own peculiar skills even though cash game experts often deride tournament players as having considerably less skill. In my opinion, the best tournament players are just as skilled but in their own right.