fundamental style/strategy differences between tourney's & ring

[elmitchbo]

i've become fascinated by this as of late. here's why... i'm a pretty good tourney player, and a pretty crappy ring game player. i can't really figure out why. what are the differences between succesful ring game strategy/style of play and succesful tournament play?

three scenario's for you to consider.... my home games, my online games, and my rare casino trips.

1. home game: i play a weekly ring style home game, and a monthly tournament with the same group of people. typical loose passive(bad) play with guys and wives, etc. i'd say two other guys in the game could give you a definition of pot odds, but thats about it. over the course of a year i'm slightly ahead in the ring game, but i dominate the tourneys. going in to the tournaments i feel i'm the overwhelming favorite, and i've never finished out of the money. in the ring game i feel like i tread water at best.

2. online: i've almost completely given up on ring games online. i tried playing micro stakes and was never able to build a bank roll. i always came in at aabout break even. on the other hand, i had immediate success playing small stakes SnG's. i'm averaging around 4th place finishes, which rarely sees me finish out of the money. that's plenty good enough to steadily grow a roll.

3. casino: very few hands to draw from, but the pattern seems to hold. basically break even in ring games, and show more success in tournaments. i've only played 4 actual casino tourney's, but made the final table and the money in two of them. small sample i know, but it seemed representative when compared to the other examples.

i'd like to improve both sides of my game, but i'm having a hard time analyzing my play. i feel like i play the same way in both situations, so i think there is something inherent to my style/strategy that lends itself to the tourney format. i'd say that i'm on the loose end of TAG play, but not quite a LAG either... about 20% vp$p. i like to get tricky a little more often than i should, which seems to back fire much more often in the ring games than in tournaments.

this seems to happen to some extent in the pro's too... guys like barry greenstein and chip reese showing more success in ring games, while howard lederer or phil hellmuth show more tourney success. some guys seem to do well in both situations. what are the theoretical/fundamental differences between the two types of play?

[Gatto]

I'm no expert, but just as a stab at this... might this be due to your stategic style? In a tourney, survival often trumps chipbuilding as a priority, so you can't put as many chips at risk with a small margin. In a ring game, the risk/reward may lean toward putting more chips at risk with small margins.

This would be due to the relatively compressed format, and typically where the blind structure is such that you have less time over witch to choose good hands to play. So, there is an increased need to get maxiumum value out of the few good spots you will get in a relatively short amount of time.

As an example... in tourney play with something like AQ, where the flop is an Arr rainbow, you may look to bet out on the flop if there's money in to make it worth it, or build on the flop, and bet out on the turn if not. To avoid putting too many chips at risk.

But, in a ring game you may want to trap a lessor ace to get them all-in and double up in the one hand, with a relatively small margin. You risk running up against an AK or a flopped two pair that wasn't identifyable by preflop action, but the reward of gaining maximum chips may be worth that increased risk.

Given where your success is, I'd hazard a guess that you're good at patient play, and keeping your chips out of harm's way over long stretches. But, perhaps when in ring games, adjustment is needed to get more value (albeit with increased risk) out of your winning hands.

[MooFrog]

I'm assuming you're talking NL play, if not then this may not apply. Either way, I'm much better at ring games than tournaments, but wouldn't want to play against most of the people on this board in either (so I may be extremely off base), so please correct me if needed.

I mainly play limit, and I found that buying into a bunch of super cheap NL SnGs really helped my limit ring game. I think that playing in ring games (NL as well), favourites lose their disadvantage that they have in tournaments (can't bust out, if you play enough the calls you are making will be worth it). I would play a bunch of super cheap limit ring games, since the price of learning should be very low (I think UltimateBet even has 0.01/0.02 games). Having to play a totally different style than you are used to may bring you an epiphany about your regular game, that you can then translate back. From my experiences the NL SnGs are so much different from what I expected from limit ring games, and thinking in such a new way really brought forward some of the major problems I was injecting into my limit game.

When you play the NL ring games, I would have the odds in front of me, and whatever good info you can find from here. If you already think in terms of tournament chip EV vs. dollar EV for all your hands, realize that anything that is +chip EV now becomes +dollar EV. Seems to me like it plays like a mix of all stages of a tournament. Blind stealing becomes about as important as it would in an early-mid level of a slow tournament, as far as I can tell.

Now hopefully someone will come along, read that rambling mess, and correct me so that you can actually find out what the difference is [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[Gbob]

Biggest difference I would see would be the number of people involved in post-flop play. With a tourney it's normally only one or two people in a hand. In a ring game people will hang on longer since their game will not end with a poor decision.

It seems the area you would have to work on then would be redefining your game to accomodate more people in the pot.