Poker—All In
Poker tournaments pit you against your fellow bettors in a battle of wits and chips.
House Edge: N/A (casino takes a portion of the buy in)
Play Like The Stars
Watch the World Series of Poker on TV and it is impossible to not be romanticized by the sight of guys hunkered over stacks of chips, millions in the offing and that make-or-break moment when a player pushes his chip pile forward and declares, “All in!” But those events demand skill levels that are through the roof, and require serious bankrolls. Stroll through a casino on any day of the week, however, and you stand a good chance of discovering a simulacrum of that action with lower buy-ins and less sharky opponents. Poker tournaments with buy-ins that can range from $50 to $500 are commonly found in poker rooms, and give you a chance to see how it feels to be a Phil Hellmuth or Doyle Brunson.
Don’t Get Blinded By The Light
The first thing to look for when seeking a poker tournament (most often Texas Hold’em) is one where the blinds and antes ascend slowly. At Aria in Las Vegas, for example, the $160 buy-in tournament comes with 20,000 in tournament chips, blinds and antes that reasonably rise every 20 minutes, and starting blinds of 100/200. “If you want to make money by playing well, you want the longer levels,” says Daniel “Jungleman” Cates, who aced the World Series of Poker’s Poker Player Championship in 2019 for nearly $1 million. “That makes it less of a luck game and allows you to play properly with your stack size.”
Go Aggressive Reasonably Early
You’re playing against eight opponents in most poker room battles. You generally wait until you have fewer than 10 big blinds in your stack before playing ultra aggressively, and there is a school of thought that you should play slowly at the beginning, waiting for blinds and antes to go up, but Cates sees things differently. “My advice is to gamble more at the beginning of a tournament,” he says, when chip stacks are high and the game plays more like a cash game. “Bad players tend to stay in longer than they should,” he says. His advice is to go after them early in order to knock them out. “Maneuvering around seven players at a time can be difficult.” So you want to choose your spots: “Play aggressively but not too loose.”
Attack The Strong, Beware The Weak
The tells of unseasoned opponents blossom beautifully at low-stake tournament tables. “When someone acts strong, he usually is not, and vice versa,” says Cates. “When someone is rude in a hand, he usually has it. If he’s nice, he probably doesn’t. And when players have good hands pre-flop, they suddenly become engaged.” With weak and medium cards, not so much.
