that nothing else will give you. You can watch as many poker players play the game as you like. You can read till you have the print burned in your brain. These things will help, but playing poker is going to be the best way for you to learn how to play. Without playing poker, you are never going to find out where your weaknesses are. You will never know how you react when you get that monster unbeatable hand. You are never going to find out what it feels like to be beaten by a royal flush when you have a straight flush ten high, and your opponent goes all in with his entire stack and yours is smaller. Ok, this may never happen, but I am sure it has happened to someone, somewhere, sometime.
My point is that there is no substitute to playing poker when you want to learn how to play poker well. Even if you play in free online poker games.
NOTE!!! Free online poker is never a good reflection on real money poker play, but at least it will give you an idea of how to play and what to expect when you do play.
Ok, enough waffle…
Playing in a MTT is a lot like playing cash poker. There are some differences though.
In a cash game, your aim is to out play your opponents in order to, at some point, leave with more money than you arrived with. If you get into a MTT, there are some things that you must ask yourself:
1. Why are you entering?
If your answer is not “To finish in first place!!!“, then don’t bother entering. You will be wasting your time and money.
2. Do you have a realistic chance of finishing in first place?
Again, if your answer is not “Yes” then don’t bother entering. Depending on a few factors here, you need to consider your chances of winning very carefully.
If you are new to playing poker and have a small bankroll of , then don’t enter a buy in MTT. You won’t have the experience to win it, and even if you do, you may be soo scared of losing, that you won’t play well. If you don’t finish in the money you will have to fund another bankroll and start from scratch.
Select your MTT carefully. You need to make sure that if you don’t play well, or just get unlucky, you will have enough of a bankroll left after the buy in to enter several more. Find a good bankroll strategy and stick to it.
3. How long do you have before you will have to stop playing?
Depending on the number of participants, the time that you will need to be able to play continuously can vary, but the minimum time that you can expect to need is about 2 hours. It could take many more hours, but 2 is pretty much the least amount of time you will need. If you don’t have enough time to devote to the MTT, don’t enter!
When you play cash games, you can always leave when you lose some of your money or win a lot of money. Nothing is stopping you from leaving these games except your decision to stay. You decide what to do. In a MTT, you cannot leave until one of 3 things happen…
You decide that you want to leave and you do.
You lose all of your chips and if it is a rebuy MTT you decide not to rebuy and you leave, or there are no rebuys offered and you are forced to leave because you have no more chips to play with.
There is only one player left and you are it. You have won and the tournament is over. This is without a doubt the thing you should be aiming at.
In a cash game your opponents get to watch you while you play, and you get to watch them while they play. In a MTT you will be shifted from table to table as the players in the tournament bomb out, to even out the tables. You won’t be able to watch many players for too long, but you should still be making notes as you go along, about what the others are doing in particular situations. I promise you, they are watching you and making their own notes on you.
Why make notes when you are being moved from table to table? Good question!
The notes you make while playing in the run up to the final table, may help you when you get to the final table. What if you notice in the early stages of the MTT, that Joe
Related posts:
