Coin Flips: Cash Games vs. Tournament
There’s a rather disturbing trend among newer poker players that have gotten heavily involved in both cash games and tournaments; they typically don’t know how to change up their style of play between the two types of poker games. The truth is, many standard strategies and tactics will work in both cash games and tournaments, but there are also some stark differences that need to be identified, one of which being the coin flip.
A coin flip situation in poker is when two players have both pushed their chips all-in (usually pre-flop) and hold hands that have around a 50/50 chance of winning. A classic coin flip situation is a medium pocket pair like 8-8 against a big non-paired hand like AK. You’ll see a lot of players eagerly shove all their chips into the pot during coin flip situations in a tournament, and often times this can be the right play, however those same players will also follow this same mentality during coin flip situations in cash games, which usually is not the best play to make.
The main difference is that in a tournament the goal is to accumulate chips quickly with hopes to make it “into the money”. Plus, the most you can lose during a tournament is whatever the buy-in was, which can often be less than $100. Because of those two factors, there are many situations during a tournament where wagering your tournament life on a coin flip can be correct.
So why doesn’t this apply in a cash game? First of all, in a cash game the only goal is to make money, and the golden rule of cash games is to get your money in the middle in the best possible situations, such as when you’re a huge favorite to win. A 50/50 chance of winning a hand isn’t a strong enough reason to wager a large amount of money and goes against the cash game principle of getting your money in with the best of it. Secondly, in a cash game you could be risking your entire stack of chips on this coin flip. In a tournament this is acceptable, but for a cash game you only ever want to put your full rack of chips at risk when you are confident you are going to win a hand. A 50% chance should not inspire confidence.
If you find yourself playing a mix of cash games and tournaments, learn to differentiate the times of when a coin flip scenario can be beneficial and when it can be disastrous and you’ll find that you’ll be playing much smarter poker.
