9bb/hr at cash and bored - switch to tournaments?

You should just find ways to make your 2/5 NLHE game spicier.

1. You could convince the player pool to play with the SB "kitty" game where people deposit dead money on the button, and the only person who can win it is the SB. If/when the "kitty" money builds up to a larger amount, this will cause the SB to play very loose. And people will play loose against the SB too.

2. You could convince the player pool to play with the bounty game. If someone wins 2+ hands in a row (he has to win the whole pot, and he can't score the bounty money by chopping with same straight/boat as someone else) then he gets $15 from every other player at the table. You should include an exemption where someone who loses $100+ in the hand doesn't have to pay the $15 bounty. This will make the guy who won the previous hand play very loosely, and people will also play loose against tha guy too.

3. You could convince the player pool to play with the standup game aka "nit game" for 1-4 rounds. Or you could take it to the next level and play squid game which is standup game on steroids.

4. You could convince the player pool to play with the 72 bounty game where someone gets a bonus like $25 if he wins the pot and shows that he had 72.

Tournaments are my favorite, but I haven’t figured them out yet. The only ones I have played are big field WSOP events, so I can’t talk about nightlies.

I’m usually leaving about the time the nightlies start, but I have noticed a distinct group over there that never plays cash. Just an impression, but the field looks much softer than the people playing cash with me all day.

The problem with tournaments is that you play a long time before anything meaningful happens and eventually it becomes push/fold where luck jumps in.

Just the nature of accumulating chips takes aggressive action which sometimes blows up when you run into a hand. Still, the same players are usually in the hunt, so there’s an art to it - or they rebuy until luck finds them.

I just want a ring. Something about having all the chips. I suggest you dabble with it, because somebody has to win that inflated prize. The steady profit still comes from cash, but tournaments are fun.

It’s not like playing the lottery, skill is involved!Strategy is not too different than cash until the late stages and the prizes are big. Prepare yourself for a lot of disappointment, but it’s definitely not boring.

Tournaments are frustrating. Most of the time you fail and wasted 4 hours that you could’ve won at cash.

That said your style is probably good for tourneys.

I cannot resist but call out —in the room I play, you will often hear/read online people talk about “the 1/3 is soft and you can find juicy tables, but the 2/5 is nit reg infested.” And then from another group “the 2/5 has plenty juicy tables, but the 5/10 is nit reg infested.”

If we’re strictly talking hourly potential, both those statements are wrong. And I imagine this is the case in most rooms. I just have a hard time imagining 2/5 games that are so tough a good player would have a lower hourly than they do at 1/3.

It sounds like your live scene is very limited - hard to make any decent money at 1/3. For tournaments it just comes down to the buy in and ROI - I don't know what tournaments they run nor ROI, but say there's a nightly 250.00 and your ROI is 40%. You'd make 100 in theory every time you play it. I do find tournaments to be more fun - cash can be repetitive unless you're playing higher stake games where the money is nice after a big win

It really just depends on how many buy ins you can get per month and your ROI. I use to play online tournaments for a living but I was getting in 2k in buyins daily, and 4k on Sundays. Hard to do that in the live scene unless you're living in Vegas I'd imagine.

Online tournaments are pretty soft at the micros, much softer than cash games. Live tournaments probably softer than online even though I've only played a handful.

Really it depends on how many options you have (location dependent) whether it's worth your time to learn tournaments. I would start online if I wanted to learn them b/c you can get your hands automatically tracked in a database and buy-ins are much cheaper (easier to review and get coaching). At the minimum, you should learn the preflop basics like short stack shoving ranges from various positions, calling range vs open shoves, calling range against reshoves, and reshoving ranges vs opens - each adjusted for position.

Also there's the tax implication of the "big beautiful bill" looming, so you can only deduct 90% of your losses I believe.

Tournaments are great for the same reason they're terrible. Would you rather grind out high hand promos $250 at a time or have a chance at a BBJ?

A fish binking $90k is great if you're the fish, not so great if you're all the grinders who lost flips against them along the way.

I don't know if there's necessarily a right or wrong answer to the above. I think you should choose whichever game has more inherent interest to you. Do you wanna study the piss out of push or fold charts or do you want to attack capped ranges and/or flop sets deep?

Impossible to say what you'll make more at. But most likely, you'll make more at what you enjoy more

Try tournaments for a month. You can always switch back

Fish will win tournaments, because there is luck involved. You need to learn how to play tournaments to play them. Often time you bust with some flip before the money. Your aggressive style is more suited to tournaments where people are trying not to bust out and later to move up in places. It doesn't work as well in low stakes cash games with calling stations.

Ive logged around 50 live tournaments in the last 4 years and im down about 14k on them, avg buyin is 1k. I dont know how guys make a living playing full time live tournaments, the variance is insane, you can literally go on a 10 year downswing, bink a tourney for 500k and be back up.

Also if you plan on playing small buyin tourneys live, the rake is killer and the structure is so turbo that no one has a huge edge.

I decided to mix it up and play a couple live low stakes donkaments. Busted midway in the first one and got 3rd place in the second. Then bricked the next 4 so I was back to cash with a new perspective. That is, I was able to reset on things that we do automatically, and see how some reads can lead to very clear cut decisions.

The one day tourneys I see at Foxwoods/Mohegan have a lot of the worst players ever in them (from v. limited play and also when they bust out and play a random 1-2 table to win it back) ... but even the weekend variants don't get that many entries, so you need to finish top 10% fairly often to even break even.

I've tried a few buyins on the bigger multiday versions, with slightly longer levels. But, as others have said, the variance on tournaments is insane.

Also a long time pro. I listen to has repeatedly given advice that larger tournaments are a bit like sitting down in a 1-2 game with the worst players ever, but if don't lose all your chips you are forced to move to a 2-5 game with better players and then are forced to move to a 5-10 game ... and all the money is made on the last table, with mostly the best players, so if you can't compete there then you shouldn't enter.

It's difficult for me to imagine trying to play tournaments for money (as in, "specifically to make consistent money"). The variance is so insane that I can't imagine realizing your EV without basically going full time.

I occasionally enter tournaments and find it fun to be in substantially different spots and definitely a different feel than playing cash. The whole tournament is a story, whereas a cash game is basically just a full reset after every hand. But I measure results based on how I felt about my decision-making and how deep I went, like I would any other sport where it's more about winning than raw dollars... if I had to look at the bottom line I would go crazy. If your measure of success is dollars per hour, I would stick to cash.

As it so often is, the answer is "it depends".

My personal $0.02...

1. My local room (Parx) has a $340 BI single-day tournament with half-hour levels every week. It starts at 11:15am and is usually done around 10pm-11pm, though can go a bit later when the field gets big. When I play, I'll typically late reg, come in around level 4 or 5 (late reg ends before level 7 starts), and if I go deep, I may end up playing 8 or 9 hours, which is about the limit of my ability to stay focused and play reasonably well. The fields are usually pretty soft, so...yeah, I like it.

2. It's not like playing cash. Tournaments aren't typically fun unless and until you go deep and run good. Otherwise, they can be a grind, very often the grinders are pricks, and you can't ask for a table change when there's an a$$hole sitting next to you.

3. It can be more profitable, but...it depends. I think I've played that Parx tourny about two dozen times, and have around $40k across 7 cashes, so I'm up a lot, sort of, if we don't account for all the times I've torched the $340 buy-in (sometimes more than one if I fire another bullet), then go play cash while still tilted, or merely still playing my "tournament" game rather than my "cash" game.

4. I do recommend checking out some smaller buy-in tournaments to see if you like them, with the caveat that there are enough differences to warrant playing a different (read: more buttoned-up) style. There are things you can do in tourny's that don't really work in cash, and vice-versa. My cash game is heavily read-based. My tournament game is almost face-up by comparison. In a weird way, playing tournaments has helped my low-stakes cash game, by forcing me to see the huge gap between winning TAG and swingy LAG.

5. On a long enough timeline, a skill edge shows up in our cash game winnings. If you're only playing tournaments occasionally, you're going to notice how much variance plays a part. It sucks to run good early in a tournament just to go card dead or get coolered and get knocked out on the bubble, but it happens, a lot. The experience can break you down or build you up mentally. If you truly DGAF about the money and just want to play your best, tournaments may be for you.

Other random observations...

That Parx tourny starts with 25k in chips and 100-100 blinds. By the time it gets short-handed, you could be sitting on 1.2M in chips but the blinds are 30k-60k and it's literally anyone's tournament to win.

As such, and contrary what all the big-time tournament grinders say, I will always entertain chopping when it gets down to 4-5 handed or less. I'll typically only refuse an offer to chop when there are more than 4-5 players left and / or when I have a chip advantage and think I have a skill advantage.

According to Hendon Mob, I've never taken 1st, but two of my four 2nd place finishes were even chops with an opponent who barely had me covered. Another was a four-way ICM chop when the 1st place guy barely had me covered.

The only time I've ever refused to chop and insisted on playing it out was when I had half the chips in play when it got down to 4-handed. I started with 1.5x my opponent's stack when we got heads-up, got sucked out on twice in back-to-back hands at 20k-40k blinds, and had to settle for a gut-wrenching second place. My refusal to chop because of my massive chip lead ended up costing me about $2k in real money.

So...don't hate on the guys who decide to chop at the end. No one cares that you binked a $340 single-day tourny. The money matters more than the non-existent glory.

Bring snacks, preferably something that won't cause a sugar-spike / sugar-crash. I usually bring a couple balanced nutrition bars.

The bathrooms get packed during breaks. Whenever you fold the last hand you're dealt before a break, don't sit and watch the rest of the hand play out. Get up, go to the men's, stretch, etc.

Tight is right, especially pre. Fit or fold post is under-rated / under-estimated. Running big multi-street bluffs is mostly torching.

Reads and live exploits are less valuable in tournaments, and become less valuable the deeper you go. The OMC who peddles the nuts in cash or the early stages of a tournament can become downright maniacal when he gets down to 10-20BB's after playing 6-8 hours.

Specifically aimed at our friend Banana - I suspect you'd like tournaments, and they may help you plug some of the leaks in your cash game. But you absolutely must repress your natural tendencies towards shenanigans. If you're going to play LAG or super-exploitative, you're better off sticking to cash.

For me, the underground tournaments in boarded-up bars and veterans and motorcycle clubs are the most profitable games around.

I played around a dozen $60 underground tournaments with rebuys in the last year. I won money four times: one first place, one second, and two others chopped, really just playing GTO with Red Chip push-shove charts on my phone. Anyone who plays in a casino has some skill or loses his stack quickly. Not here. In the poorest cities in my state, the thirty people buying-in and re-buying for the $60 tournaments just plan to lose their money, and actually the average player wins enough because the rake is only 10 percent off the buy-in, and everybody's bad. An art dealers son, as bourgeois as you get, I love playing with working-class people who know each others. Regulars at the casino are well paid professionals, tradesmen, or businessmen.

What sucks is the tournaments go late into night. I do not play my best after midnight. I also don't like arguing with gangsters about the chop when I'm tired. If I play at the casino, no one is armed. I can get home by 9pm to get up at 5am.

I like playing cash better because of the flexibility. I prefer to go after exploits deep stacked on later streets than to play GTO push-fold preflop. The tournaments also have a higher cognitive load from the safety point of view.

I wish I could win enough in tournaments like Doc to occasionally get tilted in cash.

Can't you just do both? That's what I would do. Play cash when it's good and the occasional tourney when I have the time.

Personally, I do like cash better because I hate playing for hours and busting near or on the bubble -- it is tilting. You have to fire a lot of bullets to make tournament play worth it.

FWIW, when I started playing I played tourneys. My first time to Vegas I won two tourneys at TI (only ~36 players) and chopped a third with my husband. Also won the local league. However, when I switched to cash, I stuck with it -- mainly because of the time and tilt factor of tourneys. I prefer PLO, too, and not a lot of those tourneys around. I'll play PLO WSOP circuit events when I can (cashed in one (20th) out of three).

Jobs are boring. Hobbies are fun.