[Apathy]

Hello mid-high

I have been playing primarily tournament poker for the past few months. Before that I played a mix of cash games and tournaments. Now, for the last few weeks I have decided to go back to cash games, mostly 5/10 and 10/20NL on various sites.

I think that mixing up the games you play and the structure they are played in (limit, pl, hi-lo, tournament etc.) is key to staying fresh and constantly improving, especially when playing for a living, hence my break from 90% tournament play.

I would like to share an observation of sorts that is something I took from tournament poker that I think applies well to big bet holdem cash games.

In tournaments there is this phenomenom where after a certain set of actions, or when somebody reaches a certain stack size you can tell that they are ready to give up. You could call this 'tilt' but in the traditional sense of the word that's not exactly what I am refering too. This also works the other way around. For example when somebody who rarely plays big buyin MTTs qualifies for one you know that they will be very unwilling to go broke early on, so you know that you value bet them small and take a lot of liberties with bluffing when you can threaten their stack. This is the kind of thing that great tournament players excel at, but is something you would not expect to carry over into cash games at all.

But I think it does.

I have time and time again seen people fold strong hands early on in their session and get widdled down gradually until eventually making a stand in a hopeless spot. Obviously this only applies to a certain type of player but I think it describes a large chunk of online and live recreational cash game players.

The lesson to take away from this post is that you shouldnt use your PT stats as a crutch, play less tables if you have to until you get this.

Paying attention to which stage of their session an opponent is at is amazingly important.