Tournament Adjustments

I occasionally play the odd tournament, but in the past 2-3 months have felt like I'm burning money a lot. I went through a purple patch of feeling in complete control and having great results, but it feels at the moment that I'm taking my 500nl mindset into things like the Sunday Million and it's just not working. So, I'm here to flesh out in my mind the differences and adjustments I need to take.

One thing I was very aware of when doing well is that chips lost are worth far more than any chips won. This means that taking marginal, high variance spots is far less attractive. Arguably, a 'blind' cbet that should overall make a tiny bit of chipEV is a good example. In cash games I'll make very marginal cbets and barrels, do the same with marginal value, and be content to do so because like I'll be able to handread well and play well and it's good for my overall range and I can reload and so on.

If I'm left making a pot sized bluff on the river that's going to work 51% of the time, then we should go for it. Our play up until the river takes this into account too, meaning these spots occur with decent regularity.

In tournaments, in general, a 51% successful pot size bluff should not be made, because the lost EV when the bluff fails is far higher than the EV gained when it succeeds due of stack playability. I'm not sure how a new number is quantified, it depends on a lot of factors such as tournament stage, average stack, our stack, structure, bubble proximity, etc. I can't find a single article or video anywhere covering such topics, which almost makes me think there's some sort of conspiracy of silence over it, but I know it's a *thing*.

The other major difference between cash games and tournaments is that tournament players seemingly can't hand-read, like, at all. This isn't a problem of course, but means that certain types of bluffs are far less effective. The postflop play reminds me of 50nl and sometimes 100nl too, ie I'm often in spots just being like WTF are you doing, and having no clue- random turn minraises etc. So I struggle to properly handread them in the same way as cash players, because there's less of a predictable PF base on which to build and much less certainty with how people will play certain hands postflop. It actually makes me realise just how predictable cash players actually are, and how much EV there is probably to be had by occasionally not, for example 3betting every premium PF, barrelling every draw etc.

So, if marginal spots are not to be taken, and there's less default information to be taken, then I need to be more certain before committing chips and also try to extract more information. To this end, I think doing a lot more checking on earlier streets is the way to go, particularly OOP. Upon checking, we can start to handread a little based on sizing and PSR. On wet boards, we can assume that strong hands will get betted allowing us to overbet the turn, VS weak bets we can CC and see what happens on the turn, stuff like that. Having a checking style doesn't preclude us being very very aggressive in the right spots, but it does mean the spots will be better, albeit less frequent.

That's all for now, I've got more stuff to add, but basically I just wanted to re-condition myself to be in the frame of mind of low variance survival, rather than the 'live life on the edge, take every marginal spot, bleed chips VS players who can't fold' approach I've taken in the past.