Poker Tournament Leaks

  1. Common MTT Poker Leaks. Since to develop a solid standard of play we must both eliminate our own biggest leaks and understand and exploit the leaks of others, it makes good sense to teach a solid MTT play style by running over the most common poker leaks and how to patch them.
  2. Here is the complete schedule of daily poker tournaments in the Las Vegas area, including Downtown, Henderson & Southeast, North Las Vegas, Summerlin & Northwest, and The Strip. Click on any tournament for comprehensive information and details including buy-ins, admin fees, starting chips, blind structures, days run, and more.

What are the best poker books to read for tournaments? When it comes to tournament play, “Harrington on Holdem” – Volumes 1, 2, and 3, remain one of the best resources. With detailed explanations of important concepts and real-life poker problems, these books will help you take your tournament game to a whole new level.

PokerNews Staff

Last week saw the latest running of the Poker Masters series of high rollers culminate with David Peters winning the 2018 Poker Masters $100,000 Main Event while Ali Imsirovic claimed the Poker Masters Purple Jacket as player of the series.

The seven-event series played out at the ARIA Resort & Casino and attracted many of the game's most talented players. Along the way Poker Central's Drea Renee had a chance to ask many of those participants to talk about what they believed to be the most common leaks demonstrated by amateur players.

Peters, Imsirovic, Jason Koon, Brandon Adams, Dan Smith, Justin Bonomo, Seth Davies, Nick Petrangelo, and Bryn Kenney all share their thoughts about such leaks in the short video.

Eight different leaks are identified in the video, many of them versions of players failing to value properly hands, stacks, or situations at the table.

For example, Bonomo specifically addresses players overvaluing hands when the situation suggests they should not, such as when players 'don't understand when top pair is not actually a good hand and play hands like that too hard sometimes.'

The pros also address the need to keep one's emotions in check at the table, with amateurs sometimes failing to stay cool after losing a hand.

Take a look and see if any of these leaks are ones you should be addressing:

Coverage from all seven of the 2018 Poker Masters can be found here at PokerNews. Live streams from all of the events are archived as well via PokerGO.

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    cash game strategytournament strategyno-limit hold’emstarting hand selectionpostflop strategyaggressionstack sizestiltPoker MastersDavid PetersAli ImsirovicJason KoonBrandon AdamsDan SmithJustin BonomoSeth DaviesNick PetrangeloBryn Kenney

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    Justin BonomoBrandon AdamsBryn KenneyDavid PetersDan SmithJason Koon

Over the next several posts in this series, I’ll be breaking down the most fundamental areas of your MTT game which may need work, and sketching out the main things you need to get your head around within MTT poker strategy in order to master a solid ABC game which will be enough to crush the small stakes.

We’ll also increasingly be looking ahead at some of the more advanced play needed to prevail at higher stakes. The first few posts in this series will function as a primer for solid MTT play, with later posts tending toward the higher level analysis.

Factors Which Need Weighting

Every time you bet, check, call or fold you should be able to give good reasons as to why you’ve done so, and to question these reasons in your own review and consider different alternatives and the relative qualities of those alternatives. In order to weigh up what is actually best we must have a good grasp of all the poker fundamentals as well as several concepts which are more specific to tournaments.

Poker Tournament Leaks Today

Principally this will mean understanding absolute hand values, how to calculate probabilities and count outs, an understanding of position and of the range of options available to you with different stack sizes. As in any form of poker we must learn how to put our opponents on a suitable range of possible hands given how they have played the hand up to now as well as previous hands we’ve observed. We must make good estimates given incomplete information.

Leaks

In tournaments we will have to add an understanding of ICM as well as doing more in depth work on the mathematics behind playing different effective stack sizes, since these vary so wildly across any given MTT, while effective stacks tend to remain fairly deep and to vary a lot less in cash games. We also need to be able to exploit bad players’ flaws at different stages of the tournament and in different formats.

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For example in rebuy formats bad players tend to make the error of playing far too loose, of course not in all cases but there is a tendency, and you’ll commonly see players spewing hundreds of big blinds pre and sometimes also postflop with relatively poor holdings. This more rarely occurs in freezeouts
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Common MTT Poker Leaks

Since to develop a solid standard of play we must both eliminate our own biggest leaks and understand and exploit the leaks of others, it makes good sense to teach a solid MTT play style by running over the most common poker leaks and how to patch them. While the list is long, I believe it is possible to give you the pointers you need for patching your own leaks with just a brief analysis on each case in point. Noticing the need to patch a leak is half the job, the easy half admittedly. The hard work you must do on your own is in review, running over these concepts and how they figure in your own game, and making the appropriate adjustments. Most of the next several posts in this series will be listing and giving some initial analysis on these common MTT leaks.

I am ready to take my tournament poker game to the next level!

Adjustments and GTO

Making adjustments to our opponents’ mistakes is obviously crucial to profiting in MTT poker play. Broadly speaking there are two ways to play poker – we can play an exploitable style or a game theory optimal one (GTO).

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A game theory optimal approach assumes that opponents are observing and adjusting to one another’s play, and tries to figure out a hypothetically least exploitable and optimally balanced way of playing which it is going to be hardest for tough opponents to win against. For example, against an observant opponent I wouldn’t want to size my value hand bets bigger and my bluffs smaller all the time, since this would be easily adjusted against and allow my opponent to exploit me ruthlessly and profitably. If I balance my bet sizings, perhaps mixing in bluffs and value bets of both smaller and larger sizings, this part of my game is going to be harder to exploit.

However, against bad unobservant players, balancing my bet sizings is not only going to be unnecessary but positively unhelpful for our bottom line, since villains are going to pay off our value bets when we go bigger, and still fold to our well-timed bluffs when we make them smaller (if our timing and choice of villain to bluff is indeed appropriate). Against a bad player, a GTO approach will very often be sub-optimal.

Playing a style which is exploitable in principle, but which gives us the room to exploit others’ mistakes will often be optimal in MTT play - provided the field is soft and our opponents are bad. In the micros, I’d suggest that 90%+ of your opponents will be recreational fish or at least very bad regulars, and there are still plenty of these players at the softer higher stakes games such as the Sunday Million. There are so many good examples of profitable exploitable adjustments and plays that I may have to run a whole post on this specific topic later in the series.

Next Time

In the next post we’ll start to run over the common leaks in earnest, starting with the fundamentals. These upcoming posts will take the content looked at in overview in my recent Pokertube webinar “MTT Leakbusting”, and look in-depth into each of those leak areas and how to improve on them. You can check out that webinar here.

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By LuckyLuke