Poker Articles

Tiger Woods, That Masterful Poker Teacher
By Andrew N.S. Glazer, The "Poker Pundit"

Although poker certainly isn't a sport, many similar characteristics that serve an athlete well also serve a poker player well: a competitive nature, emotional toughness, ability to perform under pressure, ability to think quickly, and perhaps most important of all, the ability to win the battles with oneself.

I think watching how the athletes deal with the pressure is one of the reasons I enjoy watching the NCAA basketball tournament so much. It's also the reason I enjoy watching golf on television, even though I'm not a golfer.

A few months ago, when I watched Tiger Woods win yet another Masters tournament, I was fascinated to learn about Tiger's scoring history at the Augusta National course where they play the Masters, the most important of golf's four "major" tournaments.

In case you're not familiar with a typical "medal play" golf tournament's structure, the golfers play one round a day for two days. After this, roughly half the field is allowed to remain in the competition for the final two days. If your score is good enough to allow you to remain in play, you have "made the cut." If your score isn't good enough, you're gone, with no chance to shoot magnificent scores on the final two days and perhaps get yourself back into competition.

Tiger's history at the Masters implies a clear game plan. He's a par golfer on Day One, and then kicks it into a higher gear for the rest of the tournament. A reporter asked him about this, and Tiger admitted that it was no accident. He intentionally plays conservatively on Day One, because "while you can't win the Masters on Day One, you certainly can lose it then." If you're a World Series of Poker fan, that phrase probably sounds familiar.

In other words, Tiger believes in himself and his abilities (another trait vital to success both in sports and in poker), and wants to be sure he makes the cut. He doesn't want to take a lot of risks early, because the risk/reward payoff for gambling isn't favorable. If he shoots a bad round, he risks missing the cut, and if that happens, all the ability in the world won't help him make a dramatic comeback in the tournament's last two days, because he wouldn't be allowed to participate in them.

On the other hand, once Tiger has a solid round of golf on the books, he's able to start taking the riskier shots that usually lead to the birdies that make him such a dominant force in golf's most prestigious event.

The most successful major golf championship player of them all, Jack Nicklaus, took a similar approach, perhaps to an even more extreme degree. Jack was a very good golfer for the first three days of any major championship, but the number of times he went out and shot something like 65 or 66 on the final day to come from behind and win was astounding.

Although Jack certainly had his rivals, he wasn't facing fields quite as talented from top to bottom as Tiger is these days, so Jack was able to stay conservative for a longer time before he cut it loose. Tiger can't afford to wait until Day Four to shoot his 65 and win; he needs to do something a bit earlier.

The same is true for you in a poker tournament: early conservative strategy is good, but there are too many good players today to hope that you can spend three-fourths of a tournament sitting on your hands and playing ABC poker. The time when you will need to crank it up a bit will arrive long before the final table.

Nonetheless, Jack and Tiger serve as an excellent models not merely for those people considering playing in the World Series of Poker Championship Event, but also for those who want to succeed in any reasonably important tournament: you just have to break shorter events down into stages, rather than days. I'm excluding comparisons to rebuy events because they require a different approach.

There is no "cut" to make in poker: as long as you have your proverbial chip and chair, you have a chance. In a way, that might be unfortunate for the average player, because if there were a cut in poker, it might force entrants to play a bit more solidly in the early going.

Although the way I occasionally exit from a poker tournament might tend to indicate I understand this concept better in theory than in practice, the reality is that poker players who consider themselves to be in the top half of any given poker tournament's entrants should probably be conservative in the early going, when the blinds and antes are small, and when what one stands to lose (everything) is considerably more important than what one stands to gain (an improved chip position).

I guess it shouldn't be a surprise that I understand this concept better in theory than in practice, because the difference between theory and practice in practice is always greater than the difference between theory and practice in theory.

I say you "probably" should be more conservative in the early going rather than you "must" in part because I dislike absolutism in strategy, but mainly because there are few successful tournament players who employ the "play a lot of hands and try to accumulate a lot of chips in a hurry" strategy.

Most of players who employ this strategy pick it because they like playing lots of hands, don't have much patience, or don't feel comfortable with an average or short stack. A few pick it simply because it does work for them, but even more pick it for a reason that makes good sense.

If you are a successful money player, a tournament strategy that blows you out of a lot of tournaments early gives you the chance to spend that time you didn't "waste" in the tournament playing side games, and if you blow out early enough, there's a decent chance you'll find yourself in a side game with someone who's on tilt because he blew out early.

Nonetheless, I'm going to assume that you're searching for a strategy that gives you the best chance to succeed in tournaments, and if you start with $10,000 in tournament chips, and play a coin flip hand for $5,000, you're going to emerge from the hand either with $5,000 or $15,000. The disadvantages you face playing with that $5,000 stack are far greater than the advantages you enjoy playing with that $15,000.

Another important item I noticed watching Tiger win is that he didn't have to play brilliantly down the stretch. His opponents were so intimidated by his reputation for final day infallibility (Tiger almost never loses when he has the lead going into the final round) that they took all sorts of desperate gambles far earlier than they would have against a different leader, and they self-destructed, allowing Tiger to cruise home playing merely good golf.

I learned this lesson in an odd way in the mid-1980s. I was a good but not great backgammon player who teamed up with the right people, and we won the 1984 "World Team Championship" in the Bahamas.

I was living in Atlanta, and occasionally would play Monday night tournaments in a local bar. Usually I won about 10% of these tournaments. After I returned from the Bahamas, I won four of the next five tournaments. I wasn't any better than before, but now I had a reputation that intimidated people into making lots of mistakes against me. At first I thought I was just playing people who'd gotten to the bar too early, but after a while it became clear my opponents were thinking their task was hopeless and in trying to play better than they could wound up playing worse than they could.

When you are facing someone you believe to be a poker equivalent of Tiger Woods, first make sure he's the real deal, and not someone who got lucky once. If it turns out he is the real deal, make him earn his chips: don't make his job easy for him with desperate gambles - especially the early kind. You can't win the Masters on Day One, and you can't win a poker tournament in the early levels. Keep that in mind, and you'll find yourself facing that final table pressure more often.