Turbo Tournaments Can Cost Your Dear
Although the introduction of turbo based tournaments was based on creating a tournament that enabled players with limited time to be able to participate, their creation created a whole new level of player error, one that can cost a turbo tournament player funds.
Turbo tournaments are very similar to their regular counterparts other than they offer a smaller amount of time between the blinds increase, this reduction in time means that the blind levels are lifted faster than in a regular tournament.
Although almost all of the rules are the same for the tournament, so many players think that they can easily convert from playing a regular speed tournament with blinds that last 10 minutes to playing within a turbo tournament that could offer blind increases every 8 minutes.
Ok the time doesn’t seem to offer a great amount of difference but the truth of the matter is that those 2 minutes between every level are critical for players who approach their gameplay with a tight and passive playing style, so much so that they find themselves having to flip their strategy in order to remain within the tournament due to the amount of chips that they are allowing to pass through their hands as they sit and wait for the killer hand that they want to enter the pot with.
Using the tight and passive poker strategy may well see you placing within the paying positions when you are playing a regular tournament but within a turbo situation you are just allowing chips to be leaked to your opponents, reducing your standing and presence at the poker table.
Picture this if you will, or even better give it a go:
Playing in a turbo tournament with the mentality and approach to only playing the poker power hands is like cupping your hands together and filling them with water.
In this instance the water will represent your chip stack at the table, ok now all you have to do it wait for the right hand so this could take you up to 3 blind levels or sometimes even more, but for demonstration purposes we’ll not make you stand there with the water in your hands for 24 minutes.
Instead, for this experiment we will call 1 minute a blind level, so now you have to hold that water in your hands for 3 minutes…. Go on… We’ll wait…..
Ok so now that your continuing to read this, i’m guessing that you have done as you were told and stood with water in your hands for the length of time, okay so lets have a look at what you found….
You will have found that by the time that the 3 minutes was up, your hands will be considerably less filled with water than when you first started, correct?
Although that was an out of the box idea, it depicts perfectly how your chip stack would look if you were to sit too tight within a turbo tournament for 3 blind levels.
When playing turbo tournaments you need to consider the fact that the level and amount of blinds is going to increase faster, meaning that rather than sitting and waiting for the right hand, you need to be looking to play the less choice hands in order to steal blinds and maybe catch a card on the flop.
We’re not telling you to play every hand by any means but that queen jack that you would have thrown away within a regular tournament needs to be given the chance to see the flop here.
Act proactive and take the chips that are there for the taking, if the table is aggressive and pots are building, then take your time as the reality is that when over aggressive players clash in these tournaments, they quickly eliminate each other.
