The passage from cash game mode to tournament mode, wanted by the founding fathers, generated an anomaly of strategy and of analytic methodology. Fifty years on, professionals and amateurs keep applying strategies that in cash game are fundamental and in tournaments are totally useless.
The second cultural change the dissertation sets out to verify starts there: abandoning profit objectives, considering them a mere consequence of working well, and concentrating resources on the quality of one’s doing. According to that principle, winning the pot in a tournament spot should be the consequence of a failed attempt to take the opponent’s stack, and not the main objective.
The Skill Poker Index are the percentage indicators that intervene only in the all-in phases preceding the river, and they establish how the pot is divided in those phases.
A tournament win rate is not measured in blinds
In cash game the win rate is the ratio of the big blinds won every hundred hands, BB/100. The compulsory pre-flop bets are hard cash, the money you pay your basic expenses with, and the steal — the pre-flop raise that forces your opponents to fold — goes straight into that count.
In a tournament the win rate is calculated another way: it is the ratio of the places in the money to the number of events played in a given period. The blind and a half you collect by making everybody fold does not enter that ratio in any way, and to claim a profit on the trip you have to place in the prize zone.
It is the same move, and it changes value passing from one mode to the other. Going from fifty blinds to fifty-one and a half acts on none of the strategies you had built with fifty. What is left is building your metagame, that is, the image of you your opponents use to decide: a role that exists, and that stays marginal.
Hence a different orientation of the pre-flop action too: what serves you is your opponents calling, because you cannot take the stack of someone you have not let into the hand. It is the exact reverse of blind stealing.
At the all-in before the river you give up your own skills
Blind stealing is only one of the gross errors that surface in a live session, and they all come from the same root: the migration of cash game concepts into tournament structures. The change of paradigm starts from how the spot is analysed.
In a live tournament you cannot ignore the enormous mass of data every phase produces and that deeply influence your choices. Mathematics does not handle them, because they do not belong to its dimension: you are immersed in the dimension of communication. It was two mathematicians, Shannon and Weaver, who first proposed a mathematical model of communication, and it was they themselves who demonstrated that mathematics can explain only some of its aspects.
Adopting the interdisciplinary analytic methodology allows every game situation to be recognised and defined. Depending on how much you manage to understand, elaborate and interpret, it leads you to reflect more deeply on the information acquired, with a qualitative work that integrates the classic quantitative analysis, and it can induce you to fold a hand that is good but not winning. It is something other than the mathematical fold, the one that throws the cards away as soon as the EV turns negative.
The classic case is the cooler: a great hand, which is not the best one. Recognising it means taking into account what mathematics does not handle — feedback, context, communicative implicits, verbal and non-verbal language — that is, reading the table and not just the cards.
Taking that same spot to the show-down before the river does the opposite: you give up in fact the possibility of acquiring new information and reacting to it. Online, with several tables open at once, there is nothing to rely on but the calculation of the EV. Live that information is there, and closing the spot before the river means not gathering it. And with that information go the skills you could have applied had you had it.
The distribution rewards the better hand and sanctions whoever risked
Among the skills that really count there is inducing your opponent to go all-in or to call one with the worse hand. It is a real skill, and when you pull it off you have used it well.
Except that the opponent who arrives at the show-down with the worse hand can improve his point before the river and overturn the outcome. Whoever induced that all-in used one of his skills well and, at the same time, gave up preserving his own stack and his own stay in the tournament, in case the board turned against his initial combination.
The distribution logic of the indices rests on this double move. On one side it favours the player who at the pre-river all-in holds the better hand; on the other it sanctions that same player, for having put the tournament at risk on a spot that has not yet reached the river. Reward and sanction fall on the same person, and that is the reason why the distribution of the pot is partial.
The indices are expressed in percentage form and act only inside the phase in which the all-in occurred. Of the tournament they touch nothing else: not the blind levels, not the structure, not the placings. They measure how much skill that phase still contained, and they divide on that measurement.
The all-in before the river is the point to work on
On the effects a regulatory intervention would have on the structure of the game there are three aspects to distinguish. The first is the genesis: the blind levels stay as they were at the origins, because too invasive an intervention would denature the game and turn the tournament into something else.
The second is the bust-out with the hand played out, and there the process is legitimate: with all the phases completed, every player has the whole board in front of him and can define the value of his own hand against those of his opponents.
The third is the all-in condition before the phases are completed, and against the encyclopaedic definition it is «the principal critical element to work on». Betting your whole stack in a street other than the river implies the impossibility of using your own skills, and at the same time compromises your stay in the tournament.
With the hand played out the sporting criterion is met
The criterion of the European Sports Charter at stake here is «the achievement of results in competitions at all levels», one of the sporting criteria the discipline is assessed on when it asks to be recognised.
The spot that reaches the river meets it in substance. The Texas Hold’em tournament is an elimination competition, which puts every player in the condition of looking for any solution that leads him to conquer his opponent’s stack, while the opponent in turn defends himself from the others’ strategies by investigating those that overturn the competition in his own favour.
The bust-out that happens with the hand played out, therefore, does not affect that criterion: the result arrived inside the game, and the one who was behind managed to find the information he needed to understand how willing his opponent was to put more chips in the pot. What does affect the criterion is the elimination decided in a phase where neither of the two can do anything any more.
The professional does not put it all in one street
Observation on the field says that the live tournament professional is rather reluctant to bet the whole amount of his stack in a single street, and prefers to beat his opponent up to the river by exploiting his own skills for the conduct of the entire spot.
It is a behaviour that adopts, more or less consciously, the principles suggested by communication theories: gathering information as long as there is information to gather, and deciding on the last one available. A skilled player can realise he has been beaten at the river and decide not to bet or to fold, preserving his stack and his own survival in the tournament.
It is the analysis of the dynamics of poker played out and of the all-in condition before the river that identified the usefulness of the tools the communication disciplines offer to fill the informational and interpretative void left by mathematics: tools that allow skills to be privileged over sheer luck.
How practicable that choice is depends on the elimination-risk situation your stack is in at the start of the spot. It is the second of the two factors the skills depend on, and it regulates how much of the skills you have identified you can really apply.