Should You Play Cash Games or Tournaments in Poker

A question that a lot of people will ask me is whether or not they should be playing cash games or tournaments. This is a hard question to answer initially without knowing anything about the way you play and therefore I have decided to write this article for you explaining what type of structure you should play. Some players are better at cash games and some players are better tournaments so you should make sure you try playing both structures.

In a cash game on Full Tit you’ll need to bring more money to the table then you’d need to play a tournament. So the first thing you need to have in order to play cash games is a good sized bankroll. Without a nice bankroll you won’t last long at the cash game tables unless you run extremely well for an extended period of time. If you’re playing no limit then the risk for losing your entire buy-in becomes a potential whereas if you play pot limit or fixed limit the pots will generally be smaller.

When you play in cash games the competition is often a lot better then the competition that you’ll find playing tournaments. There are numerous reasons why the better poker players are playing cash games and some of the reasons include the fact that there is more money out there to win plus you don’t need to commit nearly as much time playing. Now if you have the bankroll to play in cash games you still need to consider whether or not you’re prepared for the skill level of the players.

Tournaments are a lot less competitive then cash games for the most part. You can usually play deep into a poker tournament before you start running into a table full of competent players. There are always tons of fish poker players competing in poker tournaments. The one downfall about getting the latest full till poker download and playing in big tournaments is that you can be eliminated from the tournament right before the money after playing for hours on a bad beat. This is one of the reasons why a lot of the better poker players don’t even bother playing in most tournaments.

If you have a small bankroll then you should definitely give tournaments a shot before playing cash games. Generally about 10% of the playing field will make money in large multi-table tournaments so you don’t need to make the final table or anything to make a bit of money. The amount of money that you make isn’t going to be huge for finishing in the top 200, but if you manage to make a final table then you’ll definitely get paid off nicely. MTT’s offer some very nice prize pools and with one final table finish you could win well over $1K.

A lot of new players like playing tournaments due to the fact they don’t need to spend a lot of money and they get a shot at winning a huge amount of money. You will also be able to gain a lot of playing experience by going deep in some tournaments. If you play cash games you risk losing your money in a few hands and you should generally wait to play cash games until you’ve gotten some experience playing tournaments under your belt.