One of the age-old questions among beginning poker players is whether they have to be good at cash games to improve their play in poker tournaments. Seemingly, the answer would be ‘yes’ because they both involve the same game. But the reality is that you don’t have to be good at cash games just to be a good tournament player.
Both poker disciplines involve the same basic rules, but to be good at each one, you have to master quite a few different poker strategy concepts. The biggest thing to understand here is that you’re dealing with a finite stack in poker tournaments, so your stack size plays a huge part in what you’ll be able to do at the table. Contrast this to cash games, where if you bust out or your stack gets low, you can just buy more chips for your stack and maintain the full stack advantage.
Speaking from a general standpoint, cash games require more post-flop skills in order to be successful (not to say that tournaments don’t to a degree), while poker tournaments require players to be very sharp with their pre-flop skills. After all, you want to avoid wasting your stack in tournaments by seeing hands with marginal hands out of position.
Of course, this isn’t to say that you can’t benefit at all from playing both cash games and poker tournaments. After all, they’re both good practice for analyzing various poker situations and solving them by studying strategy. Furthermore, you can also switch from one form of poker to the other when you’re bored or frustrated with recent results.
But to sum this thought up, it’s generally best to specialize in either cash games or tournaments - especially when you’re short on time!
I do not think poker players necessarily need to be good at cash games and that’s where some poker players, especially experienced and great tournament players get in trouble and lose a big chunk of their bankroll.
The age of story of this is Phil Hellmuth in cash games, now don’t get me wrong I believe PH to be one of, if not the best tournament NLHE players ever, but when you put TV cameras in front of him and a tough cash game lineup, he plays horribly, combo that with running bad (Or so I’ve seen through countless shows, PAD, the Big Game, High Stakes Poker) And all those millions PH has made through grinding of tournaments just fly out the window.
It’s sad to see sure, but sometimes you have to stick to what you’re best at, and for many of us, that’s either one or the other.