Adjusting To Live Poker Tournaments

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The poker world has changed a lot in the past twenty years. In the early 2000s, many people who had gone their entire lives playing poker exclusively in live environments – casinos, home games, and the occasional major tournament series at a high-profile venue – had to adjust to the fact that poker could now be played online, and all the dynamics they were accustomed to were altered.

Fast-forward ten years to the early 2010s, and the exact opposite situation was occurring. A huge portion of the poker public, especially outside of the United States, receive their poker education online – they’re accustomed to not having to show their faces, or having to look their opponent in the eye when they bluff him, or having to be accountable for their behaviour at the table when they take a bad beat. When these players come to play live poker for the first time, often in high-profile tournaments that they’ve qualified for via online satellites, they feel lost, nervous and uncomfortable. If you’re one of these players, there are a few ways to make the transition from online tournaments to live poker go a little more smoothly.

Understanding how ranges change

One of the first things you’ll notice in a live MTT is that the standard of play is probably noticeably weaker than it would be at the corresponding buy-in level online. You can use a 10x multiplier as a yardstick – a $100 tournament online is usually roughly as tough as your average $1000 live tournament, for example, and a $5 online tournament is about the same as a $50 live event.

This variation in the standard of play often means you’ll end up giving players a lot more credit than they perhaps deserve. You might find a spot where you’re confident a decent online regular would have a reasonably significant number of bluffs in their range, but many unknown players in a live tournament might simply never bluff in that same spot. 3-bet bluffing preflop, especially in the early stages, is a lot less common in live tournaments, and you’ll have to adjust to playing a large number of multi-way limped pots in addition to this. In short, the play tends to be a lot more passive in many ways, but with a smattering of postflop stack-punting every now and again.

Picking up on tells

This is the one thing everyone tends to recognise most readily about live poker – you can actually see your opponent! You can get all kinds of information this way. The old adage regarding poker tells says that “strong means weak, weak means strong”, but this is a little overly simplistic. Some players get nervous when they bluff, while others get nervous when they have strong hands. Some players are good at remaining motionless but struggle to control their breathing and heart rate when they’re tense, while others appear outwardly calm but may fondle their card protector or shuffle chips faster when they have a big hand.

It’s your job to figure out how each person is likely to behave. Ask yourself questions – why is this person here? Are they here for enjoyment, or to make money? How would that affect the way they feel about this situation? Of course, it’s also your job to make sure you don’t give off too many tells yourself – common culprits are looking at your chips right after you make a big hand, breathing too heavily, or swallowing hard (or coughing to avoid having to swallow hard, for that matter) before making a big bluff.

Avoiding minor errors

One of the major disadvantages of live poker is that you don’t simply have all the players’ stack sizes, bet sizes and the pot size laid out for you on a screen. You have to calculate them yourself. You’ll get better at this over time, but it’s important to focus on developing strategies to help yourself. For example, it’s probably easier to just add up all the betsizes over the course of a hand to calculate the pot on the river, instead of trying to actually count all the chips that are physically in the pot once you get there.

Paying attention to stack sizes is also crucial – we’ve all made that mistake of raising preflop with a marginal hand, only to find out that the old guy three seats to our left had a bunch of black chips at the bottom of a stack of blues and is shorter than we thought, forcing us to call his all-in shove. Try to keep an eye on how players’ stacks change throughout the course of the tournament – spend time while you’re not in a hand approximating the stacks of the other players, so that when someone wins or loses a big pot, you still know roughly where you stand.

Finally, another thing we’ve all done is make a ‘live misclick’ of some sort – either you put the wrong chip into the pot and make an unnecessarily massive raise preflop, or you put in one oversized chip and forget to say ‘raise’, or you forget the blinds have gone up and try to minraise, forcing you to limp in under the gun. These mistakes are common, but they can be avoided with concentration and attention, and that’s the next thing we need to focus on.

Maintaining energy and focus

Playing live poker can be exhausting. You can very easily play a six- or eight-hour session of poker and not even cash in the tournament. For this reason, it’s important to do whatever you can to maintain your energy levels and stay focused on your opponents. Some people like to listen to music or watch TV on their phone while they play – personally I believe this is a bad idea in most cases. If music helps you focus, then that’s great, but you may be missing crucial information if you ignore the table talk. Not to mention, live poker is a lot more fun when you treat it as a social experience. Don’t be ‘that guy’ with the headphones and sunglasses who takes his $100 MTTs way too seriously.

Maintaining energy levels is part preparation, part adaptation. Preparation involves having a plan for where/how you’re going to get some food in the event you end up playing for six hours, getting enough sleep before the tournament, showing up on time and maximising your EV by registering before the tournament starts, and many other little things. Lots of players like to work out, do yoga, or meditate before big events – I can’t recommend these things enough. They’re all great ideas. The adaptation part comes once the tournament starts – feeling tired? Get a coffee. Feeling hungry? Eat an hour earlier than you planned. Feeling tense? Get up and go do some stretching on a break, or take a walk. It’s all part of allowing yourself to play your best poker.

It’s still the same game

Finally, however, it’s important to remember that whatever else might be different, you’re still playing poker. Your skill set is still the same, and the rules are still the same, so there’s no reason to feel uncomfortable with the environment. In fact, many players’ discomfort with live poker is almost entirely down to social and personal factors, rather than anything to do with their actual strategic decisions at the table. Stay focused on the game, relax, and remember you’re still playing poker. The context changes, but the game remains the same.