Cash vs. sit and go/tournament strategy

Cash vs. sit and go/tournament strategy vary in play simply because in one style you can simply reload your chips if you lose, and the other you cannot. If you are playing reckless in a tournament it could be a quick day for you. If you are running bad in a cash game though you can always top your stack off and wait until you get another hand worth playing, and get your money back.

When playing in a cash game the strategy you should have is to set out a figure you want to make per hour, and try to consistently reach that figure. If you can remain focused and stay away from going on tilt in a cash game you will be far more successful than if you just set out to play. Most cash game players will be playing a lot more hands than tournament players. The reason is that in a cash game most of the time you will be playing more than one table or rather be multi tabling. A cash game differs from a tournament, but the main difference is hands you see per hour. You will see far more hands in a cash game per hour, and that will result in you playing more hands per hour. If you are playing more hands in the short term view you will be making or losing more money. In a tournament you have one buy-in that you pay for tournament chips. When you get these chips unless the tournament is a re-buy you will only have that stack throughout the course of the tournament.

When you are playing tournament poker you only have one life to live. If you lose a race or get a strong hand cracked you can suffer greatly from it. You can possibly lose a $100 buy-in in only a couple minutes in a tournament if you lose with a big pocket pair. The best tournament strategy however is to play tight in the beginning and then loosen your play up as the tournament progresses through blind levels. This is somewhat of an opposite of cash games, as cash games go the blinds are never increased, so, you are just playing at one limit. It is like sitting at the first blind level of a tournament with a deep stack, but having it is actually money opposed to being tournament chips. With tournament chips it could be dangerous to play aggressive because you have no re-buy left to play more or reload. You could always play another tournament, but what you want to do when play a tournament is progress through it. They are similar in that way because you want to progress through the limits when playing cash games just like you would want to progress through blind levels in a tournament. The best way to look at tournaments is having one life and the inability to re-buy a new stack if you lose a big hand. When you are looking at cash games you have the ability to reload your stack, but you could be losing a great deal of your poker bonus money at any given time and don’t ideally want to reload unless you have to.