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Poker: Playing Turbo Tournaments
Prepare To Gamble- The lure of the turbo tournament is one that many players are beginning to bite down on, as the popularity of a quick tournament becomes more and more appealing to the ADD riddled youth movement in poker. Big buy-in tournaments are even running with turbo structures, like the EPT 10k turbo events. But, one of the primary things that a player has to be aware of when sitting at a turbo tournament is that, in order to win a turbo, you WILL have to gamble at some point in order to survive. The structure is designed to collapse stacks quickly and keep players constantly moving to stay afloat in the tournament. After the first 5 or so levels, don’t be surprised to see the average M hovering around 3-4 and the big stack will still barely be above M10.
Transitioning- At the beginning of the tournament, a super tight, conservative approach to play will keep you in the thick of things and avoiding unnecessary gambles in the early stages, where the value of a double up is not as vital as it would be an hour (or 6-12 levels) from now. So, a neutral equity coin flip (Example: shoving 1010 against an opener whose range runs roughly 50% against your tens) may yield a much greater return when you go from M5 to M10 as opposed to going from M20 to M40; the extra M20 does you little good early, but the extra M5 later allows you to muscle the shorter stacks and expand your game at the critical stages where everyone stays in flux with their stacks. As the tournament progresses, be looking for those spots that may seem marginal to chip up; in a turbo, they may actually be +EV in the long run, not because the actual result is +EV, but the chip position you get to if you win allows you many more +EV scenarios.
Time=Essential Factor- The biggest problem many players struggle with when playing turbo tournaments is understanding the factor in which time moves throughout the tournament. When the blinds start bringing everyone down to short stacks, you need to always be moving. If you double up to an M8 stack and suddenly think you can slow down a bit, you’re not approaching the turbo correctly; let’s say the blinds are t1,000/t2,000/(t200) at a 10 handed table, and you’re at t50,000, an M of 10, not comfortable, but seemingly out of danger for now. The problem is, in a very short amount of time (5-10 minutes) the blinds will increase to something like t1,500/t3,000/(t300), a common increase in turbo tournament increments, and your M10 stack suddenly drops down to M6.66 in a span of 5-8 hands. Once the average stack reaches M8 or less, which will vary depending on the initial stack sizes and blind intervals, no stack is safe from the advancing blinds; stay aggressive and accumulate chips, whether you’re M1 or M30; in 30 minutes, M30 may be M1.