Formats
Cash games vs tournaments
The cards are dealt the same way. The game is not the same. Cash-game chips are money you can pocket. Tournament chips are a ticket in a payout structure. Mixing the two strategies up is how winning cash players bust MTTs on the bubble.
Cash
Stacks are deep and replaceable. If you lose a buy-in you buy another. The correct play is the play that makes the most money in this hand and the next, with little regard for 'surviving'. Variance is handled with a bankroll, not with timid folds of +EV spots. Blinds are a small fraction of a 100bb stack, so play is postflop-heavy.
Tournaments
You cannot rebuy after a certain point (or at all). Blinds escalate until a short stack is all-in with any two. Pay jumps mean a fold that is -EV in chip-expected-value can be +EV in dollars (ICM). On the bubble, calling off 20 big blinds with a dominated ace can be a disaster even when it would be automatic in cash. After the bubble, pay jumps keep doing that work all the way to the final table.
- Cash: think in big blinds and expected value
- MTT: think in big blinds, ICM, and who covers whom
- Late MTT: shove/fold charts matter more than fancy turn probes
- PLO tournaments are their own course — pot-limit plus ICM is a different animal
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