Courts all over the nation have repeatedly ruled in favor of poker being considered a game of skill rather one of chance, but there is no denial: there’s a very potent element of luck involved in the game. One may as well say that the skill element is used to maneuver the luck element favorably. What that means is that through skill, you’re the artisan of your own luck. While luck won’t always side with you, if you do everything according to the book, it will favor you over your opponents in the long run.
How do you create your luck at the table though? Do you just sit around looking pretty, waiting for Lady Luck to develop a fancy on you, or do you go out there and get busy?

The first thing you can do to entice luck to your side is to take all reasonable off-table factors into account and to act on all of them. Take rakeback for instance. It has nothing to do with skill or with actual play. Being informed and just taking the time to register for a rakeback deal (like the ones offered at rakemeback) is all it takes. Rakeback will give you a more than welcome edge at the table. At certain popular limits (like $1/$2) beating the rake is what makes the difference for good players. A rakeback deal will pretty much beat the rake for you single handedly.
Table selection is another such factor, one that doesn’t call upon your actual poker skills. Some of the best players in the industry have said that how successful you are over a certain skill level depends on one thing and one thing only: table selection. Playing against players who are more than willing to give up their chips to you is not the same as playing against a bunch of skilled guys hell bent on wringing some juice out of you. These factors which are not directly related to actual play will make you much luckier at the table.

Once you take your seat at the green felt though, poker skill takes over. One of the most basic ways to make yourself luckier than your opponents are, is to exploit your table image.
You don’t actually have to cultivate a given table image (although you could do that too) however, you need to be aware of your table image at all times. The success or failure when exploiting your image doesn’t hinge on the type of table image you have. Take Chris Ferguson and Ilari Sahamies for instance. One of them plays a math-based analytic style of poker, the other one is a loose cannon. Both of them are successful though, because they’re aware of their table images and they know exactly how to exploit them too.

Being aware of your own table image is not that simple to achieve though. While you have a general table image (by which people who play against you often will recognize you) you also have a micro table image, which changes constantly as you play. While your general table image remains relatively stable, your micro table image changes all the time, depending on your actions. It is your micro table image that decides how your opponents will play against you on any given hand. For players with loose-aggressive general table images that may not be good news, for those with a solid tight-aggressive image though, it is a blessing in disguise. Because their general image prompts opponents to play cautiously against them, they’ll be forced to resort to the use of micro table images anyway.

C-betting has become such a popular move these days that almost everyone who thinks of him/herself as a good player uses it. What that means however is that many of these people won’t do the move properly: they’ll commit too often and they’ll give up too often too when faced with solid opposition. In a word: these people have a huge hole in their game, one that you simply cannot leave unexploited.
The best way to bust a bluff (because the c-bet is a bluff after all) is through another bluff. Floating is the name of the game, and keeping your opponent honest is the mission. Floating is basically tagging along, calling your opponent’s c-bet to see how he/she reacts on the turn. This is what the basic mechanism of a perfectly executed successful bluff looks like: Your opponent fires out a preflop raise to show you he wants some action. You make the call. The flop misses his hand completely, but he follows up with a continuation bet to tell you that he still likes his hand and to make you fold. You call this bet too. With the seeds of doubt already planted in his mind preflop, your second call confuses your opponent. On the turn, he decides to play it safe and checks it to you. You fire out a bet and at that point, your opponent realizes that you’ve been trying to build the pot all along, and that you probably have a monster, so he quits and folds. That’s how things are supposed to work. That doesn’t mean that’s how they are actually going to work too though. In order to put your floating plan into motion, you first need to select the right type of candidate for it. Pick a player who c-bets a lot, but fails to protect his investment by firing out a third bet on the turn.
You can do this selection via observation (the old fashioned way) or via a poker analysis software, in which case you have to look at the flop c-bet and turn c-bet stats. If you see an obvious disparity in favor of the former, you know you have your man.
Now then, you have your target. How do you execute? The floating maneuver is obviously a bluff, most often regarded as a pure bluff (which means that you do not have any sort of a hand at all when executing it), however, to stay on the safe side, you should always float with hands that do carry at least a few outs to a potential winner. You do not need to have a whole bunch of outs like in the case of a semi bluff, but having some is certainly a good idea. As they say: when it comes to floating, any sort of equity is better than no equity.
How important is it to hold some sort of equity when floating? Extremely important. As a matter of fact, if you happen to find the perfect opportunity for floating, but you do not have any sort of equity on your hand, don’t do it. Better save the ammo for the next round when your odds may improve radically.
Make no mistake, when floating, your goal is to make your opponent fold. You need the outs to have a plan B to fall back to, but hitting one of those outs and winning the hand through a showdown should be a last resort.
If you’re a cash game player, besides making money floating, you’ll need a good rakeback deal too. The Full Tilt poker rakeback is one such deal, but it only gives you about 27% rake back. If you want to go for all the marbles, why not sign up for as generous poker prop deal instead?

This question might turn out to be a more important one than you think. You see, the way you play your draws can be responsible for a very discrete, yet potent leak you have in your game. The fact is, only a part of your winnings come from hands that go to a showdown. The remaining part of the money you win (or lose) comes from hands that never see a showdown. If you manage to win more money than you lose on non showdown hands, you’re fine and your “red line” is a strength rather than a liability. If you lose more on these hands though, your read line slopes downward and needless to say, it produces a leak in your game which will make it much harder for you to make money at the table. If you have a downward sloping red line, you’re probably not playing your draws aggressively enough.

Probably due to the wide availability of educational material on the internet, online poker has grown more and more competitive over the years. Nowadays, 6-max games are insanely aggressive online. There’s absolutely no point in not playing a draw like a 4-card flush on the flop aggressively. Your average player raises at least 16% of his hands, and he goes on to c-bet around 70% of the time. If you aim to slow-play your draw and the turn card misses you, you’ll have no choice but to fold to your opponent’s continuous pressure. Moves like this are among the leading causes of a nasty downward pointing red line. The solution? Be aggressive.

Why is it that being aggressive is a better choice than slow-playing your draws? The semi-bluff is an excellent example in this sense. You do know why a semi-bluff is better than a pure bluff or a slow-played draw, don’t you? Because it offers you two ways to win the hand. You can take it down by forcing your opponent to fold, or you can take it down by filling up your draw and showing it down. A little something called “fold equity” is at work here. It is because of this fold equity that being the aggressor always offers you better odds than being the caller.

The reason why being aggressive in an already ultra aggressive game is the best way to push your red line upward again, is that with your opponents being as aggressive as they are, they’re likely to put a lot of money into harm’s way on subpar hands. That’s right. With them raising 16% of the time and then c-betting that 70% of the time, you’ll be faced with some real rags on the flop and your opponent will have to yield to your raise, his hand unfit to take the battle to that level.

Suppose you make your aggressive move on the flop on your 4-card flush and your opponent calls you. In this case, you need to contemplate his calling range a little. In such aggressive games, people are generally tempted to call a bet or a raise on the flop somewhat lightly. If you suspect that is indeed the case, shove it all in on the turn and watch your opponent fold to the pressure.

If your opponent goes all-in in response to your bet/raise on the flop, you’re in a pretty tight spot. Like it or not, in this situation you need to make that call. Such shoves generally offer you pot odds so great that they beat your nine-outer against odds twice.

That brings us to another issue concerning aggressive play: the variance. Whenever you go aggressive, you need to expect the variance to play wild tricks on you. You have to prepare yourself mentally to look at the long-term picture. The wild short term variance may seem intimidating, but your red line will thank your for the aggressive approach in the long run.

Sign up for a rakeback deal to further enhance your hourly rate. A deal like the Betfair rakeback or the Absolute Poker rakeback will take the bite out of the poker rake.

One of the biggest mistakes rookies make at the green felt is related to how they treat their own mistakes. Apparently, most beginners are simply unable to learn from their own mistakes, unless those mistakes are so large that they lose their entire stack on its account. Most mistakes however are much more subtle than that. The person committing the mistake only loses a small amount of chips per pot, however if one were to keep track of all these small losses, the end result would be a surprising one: these small mistakes which compound in the long-run, end up costing the player more than the few big mistakes he makes.

Here are some of the most important tiny leaks that beginners have in their game.

The coin-flip. This one’s a true classic. If you join an online poker room (preferably one that offers rakeback too) and you sit down to a cash table, you’re almost certain to see preflop all-ins. Such preflop moves are usually the sign of a player hoping for a coin-flip and a subsequent double up: the seemingly easy way to rack up the money. The problem with these cash game coin-flips is that they carry negative EV most of the time.

Beginners who learn the game from television are most vulnerable to this sort of leak. Televised poker games are usually tournaments and only the juiciest parts of the action are shown as hours upon hours of folding and checking doesn’t really work well for ratings. The highlights of televised events are the coin-flips that players are willing to take in the late stages of tournaments to somehow prolong their tournament lives. What beginners fail to understand though is that tournament play is radically different from cash game play, especially through the prism of the perpetually escalating blinds. There comes a certain point in a tournament when putting your entire stack into harm’s way on nothing but a coin-flip doesn’t just make perfect sense, it is one of the best possible decisions you can make.

Such coin-flip justifying circumstances are inexistent in cash game poker. Here, the advice of any investor to just wait till the odds are better and pounce on the opportunity then, is the golden rule. Let’s take a look at a classic example: the A,K. In the late stages of a tourney, shoving all-in on an A,K is natural. In a cash game it’s not such a great choice. Here’s why: when you make that do or die move on your A,K in a tournament, you’re highly likely to be up against a small pocket pair or a hand like 8,9,  or 7,J people push all-in on out of desperation and the lack of another – more viable option. In a cash game, if you’re faced with players who understand how money is made in cash game poker, you’re likely to be behind from the start. In a cash game, a preflop shove can only possibly be justified by pocket rockets, pocket Ks or A,K. This means that the best you can hope for – save some extraordinary good luck  - is to split the pot.

Another common beginner mistake is the overplaying of subpar hands. If you could watch a beginner play, you’d be surprised to see how many chips he’s willing to risk on a top pair, not to mention a pair of As.

The overplaying of hands like say a 2 pair on the flop, stems from the low level of thought beginners play on. When the beginner sees his two pairs on the flop he tells himself  he’ll take this one all the way even if it eats up all his chips.

The experienced player, who’s achieved a higher level of poker thought, sees things in a different light. He knows that if his opponents have nothing, his two pair will only earn him the blinds and a little more on the side. If his opponent has a pair, he might be willing to call a bet. There’s only one way for his opponent to take that hand to a showdown and that is if he has a set or something bigger.

Always look at your hand from the perspective of your opponents. Take your poker thought to a higher level and eliminate these apparently petty mistakes from your game.

Sign up for rakeback too.  Playing without a rakeback deal like the full tilt rakeback or the NoiQ rakeback can be considered a mistake like the two described above. Rakeback-less play is indeed a lot like sailing along in a leaky boat.

Because Texas Holdem is a fixed position game, where you sit at the table offers you certain advantages over your opponents or disadvantages. Generally speaking, being “in position” means to act after the majority of players at your table, possibly after all of them. Being out of position means to be among the first to act.
The dealer button goes around the table in a clock-wise direction, and position is dependent on the dealer button. This means that wherever you sit, you’ll have your turn being in early position as well as in late position. You can secure an advantage over a given player though, by sitting down on his/her immediate left. That will mean that you’ll have to act after him/her the majority of the time.

As you probably know, the worst position to be in is the UTG (Under The Gun) because the player sitting there will be the first to act in the preflop betting round. The best possible position is in the button, because the button is the last to act on pretty much every street. The cut-off (the position on the immediate right of the button), is not a bad position to be in either, as it has the power to mess up the button’s blinds-stealing plans, in case the other players fold around or call.

Here are some of the advantages that being in late position offers you:
- You’ll gain plenty of information on your opponents without having to pay for it, and you’ll be able to make your reads before it’s your turn to act.
- The bluffing opportunities that being in late position offers you are quite endless. You’ll be able to pull off some pretty cheeky bluffs without getting caught and thus you’ll make a lot of free money in late position.
- You’ll also be able to gauge the size of your value bets more accurately, and thus you won’t end up losing money on account of making the incorrect size raise.
- Most importantly: being in position will allow you to control the size of the pot. In layman terms: you’ll be able to keep the pot small when you’re pushing a weak drawing hand and you’ll be able to build the pot if you have a monster.

Knowing how to use position to your advantage at the poker table is like rakeback: it is among the most elementary ways to secure a lasting edge.
Signing up for a deal like the full tilt rakeback or the ongame rakeback is like money in the bank: if you play, it’ll guarantee you an additional revenue-stream.

Suited connectors, together with suited one-gappers and small pocket pairs are excellent hands in deep stacked cash games. The reason is that while they do not get hit by the flop that often, they carry excellent implied odds and when they do land a pot, it’s bound to be a huge one. The value is obviously in making flushes, straights, or – in the case of small pocket pairs – sets.

The only problem with these great implied odds hand is that they lose value fast in short-stacked situations.

Because MTTs and SNGs rarely offer players deep stacks, it’s fair to affirm that suited connects lose value in tournaments in quite a dramatic fashion.

Here’s why such implied odds hands tend to drop value in short stacked games: as I said above, the straights and the flushes that offer these hands their implied odds potential, come about fairly seldom. Exploiting the implied odds means that you have to invest and lose some money before you hit your hand and recover it all plus some on the side.

In a SNG or MTT, you cannot afford to make all those calls and lose all those chips, because those chips represent your tournament life and chances are you’ll bust out before you hit a hand that allows you to recover your losses.

Should you play suited connectors at all in tournaments then? While there’s less value in them, they are playable under certain circumstances. The first thing you need to consider when contemplating how to play your suited connectors is position. In order to make the decisions easier on yourself, as a general rule, do not play them from early position. If you’re in late position, you can sometimes play them.

In the early stages of a tournament, players have the deepest stacks compared to the size of the BB+SB. At this stage, your suited connectors still retain some value. You can play them from late position, especially if the other players check around to you.

In the middle stages of a tourney, the suited connectors are hardly playable, from late or from early position.

In the late stages of the event when things pretty much turn into a craps-shoot, there’ll be some blinds stealing value in suited connectors played from late position again.

Make sure you sign up for rakeback even if you only play in tournaments. The NoiQ rakeback deal or the Cereus rakeback deal offer you rake rebate on your tournament fees too.

Like it or not, in a tournament, you’ll be faced with several coin-flip situations. As a matter of fact, the further you advance in a tourney, the more such situations you’ll have to deal with. As the blinds escalate and the action loosens up, people will be forced to risk their tournament lives on such coin flips. First of all, let’s define what a coin-flip is in poker: when you go to a showdown vs another player with about 50% chances (at the time the money goes all in) to win. If you shove all in on your pocket Jacks against your opponent’s A,K, you’re in a coin-flip like this.

Now then, these coin-flips may carry a marginal EV+ in a cash game, where you can reload if you go bust, but in a tournament, where your survival is pinned on it, you’ve got another thing coming. Going for coin-flips is not the way to play cash games either – despite the marginal EV, but in tournaments, the flip is bad news, yet still it’s much more common there in the closing stages.

Nobody likes to pin his/her tournament hopes on the coin-flip, but desperate times call for desperate measures as they say and people who do it usually do it out of necessity.

In a cash game, the adverse odds are a clear indicator of what you have to do: save your money until a more favorable circumstance arises for the investment. In a tournament, you simply cannot do that. The escalating blinds will force you into the corner sooner or later, and going all-in on a coin-flip will become your best chance for survival.

Now then, what exactly can you do to optimize your coin-flip odds? Can you do anything at all? You certainly can. While whether to go for the flip or not is not a choice you can make, when you go for a flip is a different matter altogether.

Coin flip situations always involve two people who start out with equal odds – though only apparently so. There’s a subtle factor at work here, called the fold equity. The fold equity gives a considerable advantage to the person shoving all in, over the guy making the call. Think about it like this: you make the shove and then wait for the other guy to make up his mind whether he wants to call it or not. There’s a chance that he’ll fold and give you the pot right there. If you’re the guy who’s brainstorming about whether or not to make the call, there is no such option. Once you make the call, it’s all in there and you’ve pretty much surrendered yourself to Lady Luck’s caprices.

Therefore, the first coin-flip lesson is: be the aggressor instead of being the one pushed around. That will secure you some extra fold equity.

Accurately assessing the value of your starting hand is the second coin-flip lesson. Remember, a coin-flip is supposed to be a 50-50 split and not a 30-70 one. Easily dominated hands will often have you trapped on the wrong end of this equation, and you’ll find yourself praying to get lucky enough to make it at least a coin-flip.

A classic example in this sense would be the A, bad kicker vs any truly coin-flip hand (Like Q,K suited). Now, your A,2 suited may be better than a coin-flip against a K,Q suited, but if you consider that your opponent may also hold an Ace, you’ll see that you are in fact on the 30% end of this match-up.

The deuce means that any other hand with an A in it has you thoroughly dominated. The conclusion is, that you have to have a pretty good read on your opponent before you decide to go to a coin-flip with him. You have to know the approximate range he’s willing to push all-in on, otherwise you just won’t be able to pick your spot well. Take a small pocket pair for instance. That’s a hand which is better than a coin-flip on anything but a higher pocket pair. If you run it into a higher pocket pair though, you can pretty much stop dreaming about your 50-50 match-up.

Give your coin-flip all-in serious thought before you commit and sign up for rakeback. A rakeback deal like the Full Tilt rakeback or the Ultimate Bet rakeback will give you a 27-30% long term edge over all your rakeback-less competitors.

You know the old theory: the key to being successful in poker is to avoid making any mistakes and to exploit the mistakes that your opponents make. That doesn’t mean though that you just have to sit around waiting for your opponents’ mistakes…you can and you should get out there and force them into making mistakes. The best way to stay out of trouble and in the same time to put pressure on your opponents forcing them into making mistakes is to control the hand.

I’m sure you’ve heard about how important it was to be in control of a hand. The person who controls the hand controls the pot. The person who controls the pot controls his losses and wins. He can actively minimize his losses on weak hands and maximize his winnings on strong ones.

How can you assert control in a hand? There are four main ways to do it:

-          Position, position, position. Poker is a game of partial information, so the more info you can gather on your opponents, the bigger the edge you’ll secure on them. Position allows you to gather tons of intelligence without any peculiar effort. One of the most important tells in poker is linked to players’ betting patterns. They can wear shades to hide their eyes, they can wear baseball caps to obscure their faces, but there’s nothing they can do about their betting patterns. Betting patterns always carry some sort of information, which you have to decode to the best of your abilities. Being in position means that you gain access to all the other players’ betting-related information, before you make your move, and before they can pick anything up on you. This is why you should always try to take a seat on the left of a player whom you know is dangerous. Being in position will be helpful later on in the hand too, as it will give you control of the size of the pot. Being out of position puts extra strain on your opponents, as they’ll be fighting an uphill battle all through the hand. They’ll be playing scared poker basically and that alone might drive them to commit mistakes.

-          Staying on the attack. It is extremely important to be the aggressor at the table. If you’re the one doing all the betting and raising and none of the checking and folding, you will quickly assert control in the hand. As the saying goes: hands which are not worth raising or betting are not really worth playing at all. Assert control through your aggression and hammer home the edges that this control gives you.

-          If you are aggressive and dominant, sooner or later you’ll be feared by your opponents. When you’re feared, you have the option of retaining control in a hand at will, even after you decide to voluntarily give that control up and have second thoughts about your decision. If you’re feared, you’ll find countless ways to turn that fact into an advantage and to create edges every step of the way.

-          Holding an intelligence edge over your opponents is of paramount importance. Just as I discussed it above in the paragraph about position: if you know more about your opponents than they do about you, you automatically assert control. Power and aggression is not going to do it without this surplus information edge.

Having too much control in a game can be detrimental too. The flip-side of the coin is that as you have ever more control over a game, you’ll find it more and more difficult to take down bigger pots. The most profitable situations are when your opponents believe they have control of the hand and they’re wrong.

Make sure you do not play without rakeback. In a cash game (but in tournaments as well) rakeback will give you a huge edge. Take the Full Tilt rakeback for instance or the Ultimate Bet rakeback which both give you a 30% or a near 30% rake rebate. Skipping rakeback is a huge mistake and you don’t want to commit any mistakes, do you?

The continuation bet, also known as the c-bet is one of the most potent weapons in a good poker player’s arsenal. The c-bet represents the best way to take advantage of the edge you’ve created with your preflop raise. Many beginners have trouble playing their hand past the flop when they’ve made a preflop raise and the flop has missed them. What they’re prone to doing in such situations is to check and thus to give up all the advantage their preflop raise has created. In such situations, it is profitable to c-bet a high percentage of the time because: when you make your preflop raise, you’re basically telling your opponent that you have a good hand and you’d like to get more money into the pot on it. By calling your preflop raise, he tells you that his hand is probably weaker but he’d like to take a peek at the flop on it nonetheless as he might improve there.

If you fire a bet into your opponent on the flop, you’ll tell him that you still like your hand and that it has either improved further with the flop, or it was strong enough before it too. If your opponent didn’t get hit by the flop, he’ll most likely fold here. Given the fact that most of the time, the flop misses both hands involved, your c-bet will earn you the pot a large percentage of the time.

The c-bet is an especially profitable move online where the majority of players are hopeless fish who leave tons of dead money in the pot whenever they’re faced with post-flop aggression. This is exactly why sometimes it’s a good idea to play your implied odds hands (like small pocket pairs, suited connectors and suited one gappers) aggressively before the flop. The flop will probably miss you, but if the situation is ripe for a c-bet, you’ll give yourself an excellent opportunity to take the pot down anyway.

As with every poker move, you need to be careful not to abuse the c-bet. Once you begin to c-bet every single preflop raise you make, you become predictable and your opponents will pounce on the opportunity to exploit your weakness.

There are situations when you should c-bet aggressively and there are situations when you shouldn’t.

Keep an eye on the board and try to determine how the situation looks from your opponent’s perspective. Your preflop raise tells him you probably have high cards. If the flop brings along other high cards that look like they may have helped your hand, don’t hesitate to fire that second bullet.

Flops that likely missed your opponent’s hand are also practically begging for a continuation bet. Another thing you should pay attention to when you’re contemplating a c-bet is the number of players left in the hand. The fewer players there are, the better, with the ideal situation being a heads-up one obviously. The more players there are in the hand after the flop, the more likely it is that one of them will get hit by the board.

Knowing when to c-bet is good, but you also have to know when firing that second barrel is not that good an idea. Some flops come rich in draws. These flops are likely to have helped your opponent. Of course, you’re never going to be 100% certain which flop helps your opponent and which doesn’t, but you can put him on a range based on his preflop actions and you can approximate the cards that possibly help him.

Sizing your c-bet properly is another dimension of the issue. Your goal here is to make him fold, but you shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that at the end of the day, you are in fact bluffing. About two thirds of the pot should do for your second bullet, as it’s a big enough bet to sow fear in your opponent’s heart and it is small enough to remain thrifty.

Never belly up to a cash game table without having signed up to a rakeback deal. Poker rakeback gives you a nice rebate on all the rake you generate and on your tournament fees. Don’t give up money you don’t have to. Get your rake back and give your bankroll a boost at the end of the month (or whenever your rakeback is due). Take the Ultimate Bet rakeback for instance: it will return 30% of all your game-related expenses.

Almost every beginner starts out at the cash tables when he/she makes the move from play money to real money tables. Cash tables offer low enough limits for beginners to get the feel of real money games without having to pay a high tuition. Moving up the limits in time makes it possible for these players to earn more and more money as they chisel their skills. The time comes though when they realize the real opportunities are in tournaments (both STTs and MTTs). Don’t get me wrong, there is money in cash games too, the only problem is that you need a huge bankroll to generate good money at the cash tables. In a cash game, you’ll also pay way more rake than in tournaments, and unless you sign up for a rakeback deal, that is going to cut into your winnings quite deeply. In tournaments you only pay a one-time tournament fee and you’re done, and your rakeback deal will even have that covered. That’s not what the main difference between tournaments and cash games is though. The most significant difference consists in the buy-in/potential revenue ratio. In cash games, you need to come to the table properly stacked if you intend to make money, because the size of your stack pretty much defines your possibilities when it comes to making money.

In a tournament, you buy in for a set sum and you stand to win multiple times your buy-in. In STT’s that ratio is much worse than in MTTs where you can literally make 1000 times more than you buy in for. In STTs, the odds that you get on account of the limited number of competitors compensates for the reduced investment/potential return ratio.

What are the implications of moving from the cash table to tournament play strategy-wise though? If you’re a good and accomplished cash player, does that mean you’ll be a good tournament player as well? Not exactly. You see, poker seems like a simple game on the surface but it’s usually much more complicated behind the scenes. Tournament strategy is shaped by several tournament-only peculiarities, among which the foremost is the escalating nature of the blinds. Tournaments feature different blind structures depending on how fast they’re intended to come to a conclusion. All tournaments feature escalating blinds though, and finite player stacks. In a cash game, if you run out of money by losing your buy-in to a bad beat, you can re-load and be on your way undisturbed, with a basic guarantee that if you continue to play EV+ hands, you’ll eventually recover your losses and walk away with money. In a tournament, you have no such guarantees and possibilities. If you lose your starting stack in a tourney, you’re done for: you’re out and you won’t have the opportunity to come back and hammer home your EV+. Sure, there are tournaments which allow you to rebuy, but these rebuys are not significant enough to change the general optimal strategy approach imposed by the nature of the finite stacks.

In a cash game, your stack is an attack weapon, which is not directly linked to your survival. If you lose it, you can replace it. In a tournament, your stack takes on a double role: it will be your weapon to help you amass more chips, but in the same time it will represent your tournament life too.

The size of your stack is always relative in a tournament. It has to be continuously compared to the size of the BB+SB. Depending on how big your stack is, compared to the BB+SB, your strategy approach needs to change radically. This means you have to be extremely flexible strategy-wise. Cash games require no such flexibility. As long as you’re properly stacked and bankrolled (and you should always be properly stacked and bankrolled), you can play the same old implied odds based waiting game with only slight changes in what concerns its subtleties.

Regardless of whether you play in cash games or tournaments, you should always sign up for rakeback. Grab a generous rake rebate deal (like the Betfair rakeback which offers 40%) and  have part of your tournament fees returned to you at the end of the month.