First, some housekeeping: I’ve just released a new course – Intro to Mystery Bounties – that takes you through all of my up-to-date work on this popular format. The contents of this course are also available in the larger Bounties Made Easy bundle, but many live players especially mostly play Mystery Bounties, so I wanted to make this course accessible to them. Get 30% off this and all other courses until midnight on November 30th with code BlackFriday30. Prices go back up Sunday!
Now, let’s talk about tactical plans. In NLHE we can use any bet size at any time. We can also use any approach to our sessions to ensure the best results. Everyone is different, and each may have very different needs, resources, abilities, etc. The best players know themselves and what works for them and focus on building session plans around that.
Building a tactical plan for my sessions that works best for me has been some of the most important work I have done in the last five years. When I started out as a pro, I had the same advice drilled into my head as most players have likely heard: volume Volume VOLUME!
If you are able to play a lot of volume, that is solid advice to include in your session/yearly tactical plan. Tournament poker is usually high variance, meaning even the best players can and do lose over varying numbers of games played. Many of the best tournament players in the world have a 10 to 15% cash rate in tournaments, and it’s uncommon to find a player who has a cash rate over 20-25% over a substantial sample. In addition, those that have a high cash rate may not have the best overall results if they aren’t consistently winning tournaments when they cash, as it is not possible to be a profitable player by min-cashing alone.
This means that 80 to 90% of the time we enter a tournament, even if we are the best player in the world, we will lose our entry fee. And it’s possible to go a long time in between winning tournaments, or placing in the top three, where most of our win rate comes from.
If we are a winning player, however, if we play enough tournaments over the long run, we will realize our actual EV and show the expected positive win rates. In addition, the more tournaments we play, the more we would be expected to win.
It’s no surprise then that volume, or playing a high number of tournaments, is a primary focus of so many players. It is the most obvious tactic for reducing the variance and results of tournament play when we lose such a high percentage of the time.
However, it is not the only factor we can adjust to reduce our variance. As someone who is not currently able to play a large number of tournaments in a week, month, or a year, I’ve had to come up with a different approach.
I started by identifying my needs, strengths, and limitations. In my best weeks, I can play maybe 15 to 20 hours total. But I noticed a drop off in my ability to concentrate and execute after four hours, and a huge drop off after six hours. This can be a challenge for tournament play when it is common for tournaments to last as long as 8 to 12 hours.
In addition, I know from experience that I can not play more than 4 to 6 tables at a time without a large increase in misclicks and timeouts, which very negatively affects my ROI.
So this is what my current tactical session plan looks like: 4 to 6 hour sessions playing 4 to 5 tables at a time over a maximum of 3 to 5 days a week. This usually results in entering a maximum of 8 to 12 tournaments per session. Doing the math we can see that this means I will only be able to play 1000 to 1500 tournaments per year, a number that many professional players play each month, if not every week. playing such low volume means in theory it would be quite easy for me to have losing years, even though I have been a winning tournament player for several decades.
But volume isn’t the only factor we can adjust to reduce variance. The other two major factors that influence the variance of our tournaments results are field size and ROI.
It is much easier to win a tournament with 50 to 100 entrants than it is to win one with 1000 or 10,000. The closer we start to the final table, the easier it is to get there. Therefore playing small fields is an effective strategy to reduce tournament variance.
ROI also has a tremendous impact. Even for the best multi tablers, there is a reduction in ROI for every table added. If playing a lot of tables doesn’t dramatically reduce one’s ROI or turn it negative, it can be an effective plan to play lots of tables. It can also be a fine strategy even with a reduced ROI, if there is enough volume to make up for it. However, if it is not possible to play many tables effectively, capping tables Is likely a better strategy.
Understanding variance in this way is similar to the popular maxim that you can do something well, fast, or cheap, but never all three at the same time. In poker, when we prioritize two of the pillars of reducing variance – high volume, large fields, or high ROI – the third is almost certain to suffer.
It’s difficult, if not impossible, to have optimal or outsized results in all three areas at the same time. Increasing volume and field size will decrease ROI. Increasing ROI usually correlates correlates with a reduction in either volume or field size or both. Perhaps we can have a high ROI with high volume, but likely only if we keep our average field size low.
How do you approach your sessions or yearly tactical plan? I’d love to hear about it!
