Playing big offline tournaments

You'll start with 30,000 in chips and the blinds at 50/100. That's 300 big blinds. A typical online tournament might start with 1,500 in chips and blinds at 15/30, or 50 big blinds. On top of that, the Main Event has an amazing two-hour blind structure. The slow pace of blind escalation coupled with the larger stack size creates an entirely different type of play and many poker players have problems adjusting. Don’t be one of them!

Those who most often get into trouble are aggressive online players used to making lots of re-raises and all-in moves pre-flop. Such players will quickly find that this strategy does not work in a deep-stack tournament. In the early stages the only time your all-in will get called is if you are beaten. Re-raises also lose their effect because the stack sizes are so much deeper. In a typical online tournament with the blinds at 15/30 and a standard opening raise of 90, a re-raise to 300 has significant meaning because it is 20% of your starting stack. In a deep-stack tournament like the WSOP, however, a typical opening raise to 300 with a re-raise to 1,000 is only 5% of your starting stack. Players are much more likely to give you unwanted action and many players have difficulty making this adjustment.

Keeping your focus

The failure to adapt usually leads to a player’s stack shrinking and the player becoming frustrated and moving away from their best game. While it is important to be aggressive and constantly look to accumulate chips when the situations arise, it is perhaps more important to maintain discipline and be patient. The WSOP isn't won in one or even ten hands. It's a long grind of a tournament that will see you suffer numerous bad beats. Your goal will be to have enough chips to withstand the bad luck.

That said, it's important to play the style of poker that got you there in the first place. Another common problem is that players get intimidated by the big buy-in and the glittery professionals, not to mention the overwhelming atmosphere of the WSOP Main Event. Loose fish become rocks and rocks become calling stations. You still want to be patient and disciplined, but do so within the framework of your game and not someone else’s. Most of all, have fun as you rip up the tables!