To many, the initial lure of poker is that any player can hit a huge tournament score and win unparalleled riches. But once you get beyond the glitz and glamour of multi-million dollar WSOP and WPT champions, the reality involves grinding away for hundreds or even thousands of poker tournaments before reaching that elusive big prize. And sorry to say, but you’ll be in for a lot of mincashes on the road towards wealth.
Interestingly enough, some players seem to experience more than their fair share of mincashes. And it’s really tough to increase a bankroll when your best tournaments are only paying out double what your buy-in costs. Assuming you’ve ever had an issue with this, it’s worth looking at some strategy for overcoming the mincash problem.
Field Sizes
Sometimes your mincash troubles can be as simple as looking at the size of the tournaments you play. For example, the Sunday $125,000 Guaranteed at Carbon Poker is an excellent tournament to play in because the top players win thousands of dollars. However, the fields often feature 1,000 players or more, which makes it tough to earn a big cash. That said, it’s a lot easier to make final tables and hit large scores when you’re in something like a 100-player field or less.
Blind Structure
In addition to rethinking the size of tournaments you usually play in, it’s also important to focus on the typical blind structures that you see. For example, if you’re playing a turbo and you build a large chip stack early, you’ll still have to take plenty of risks because blind levels go up every five minutes. Assuming you try to sit back and wait for perfect opportunities, your stack is going to dwindle quickly, and make a mincash more imminent. On the other hand, some of the guaranteed tourneys at Carbon see blind levels increase every 15 minutes, so being overly-aggressive here can hurt your big stack when there’s time to wait and pick good spots.
Your Personal Experiences
One more consideration to look at when you are constantly mincashing includes your personal experiences. For instance, some players do excellent in the beginning of a poker tournament, only to fade away during the middle stages – and this is when you should be building onto your stack in order to grab a bigger cash. So if this is your problem, you need to focus on stealing more pots and blinds in late position as the tourney rages on.
Above all, the main thing you need to do when trying to break the mincash curse involves being aggressive in the middle stages of tournaments, rather than playing overly-conservative and passive.
