Large Field Tournaments

Players can find tournaments with large fields overwhelming. They do fine when playing in tournaments with small fields but when they make the leap to a large one they choke.

It’s not the number of players that causes players to fail, it’s usually their play. Some players think that you need to change your style or play when in a bigger pool of players, this is not necessarily true. If you have a strategy that you are comfortable with and it is usually a winning strategy then why change it? You really only need to worry about the one table that you are at and the opponents at that table. If you can beat them, you are on the right track. Beating them will gain you the chips you will need for later as the tournament progresses. The difference between a 250 person tournament and a 1000 person tournament online is usually around 3 hours.

Many players try to take big chances in the beginning of the tournament to accumulate chips yet in the same small tournament, they would even consider it. The other thing they do is they play more hands than normal because they are looking to gamble. It’s okay to gamble in the late stages when you have little choice but why put your tournament life up when it is not necessary? What you need to do to determine if it’s getting time to do something more drastic, is to look at your stack versus the size of the blinds. If your stack is 10X the blind, then you had best start looking to make a move.

Large land based events can last days, like the WSOP. Tournaments like this will have very good blind structures so that you are not pressured to make moves and you have the time to play your game. You will almost always see the players who are at the top of day 1 in an event like this are never at the final table. That is because they take too many chances and some of them get paid off the first day but by day 3, they have paid everyone else off and are gone.

So no matter what size the tournament is, worry about the one table you are at, the players at that table, and everything else will take care of itself. Never alter your game do the size of the field.