Poker tournaments are a particularly brutal form of poker, because every entrant but one will necessarily lose all their chips at some point. Everyone except the winner will go away thinking "What might have been" if only their ace king had made a pair when racing versus queens, or if only that gutshot hadn't binked on the river in that 25bb pot. I suppose that tournaments appeal to a certain personality type, which might be labelled "degenerate", since playing a game where you are almost guaranteed not to win seems rather illogical. The format arguably requires greater amounts of luck than cash games do. It might even be argued that tourneys are just glorified coin-flipping games; a lottery where Jerry Yang or Jamie Gold can win millions of dollars, while solid pros run below EV for life.
That's not to say that tourneys are completely terrible. They can actually be quite good fun, if you're some kind of masochist that likes sitting around for 8 hours with a bunch of subhuman mutants, one of whom will ultimately puke all over your dreams.
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