I suppose you all know the value of suited connectors in deep-stacked cash games (BTW, if you’re playing in a cash game, you should always play deep stacked). They are excellent implied odds hands because they carry the possibility for a straight as well as for a flush. Now then, being the cash game player that you are, you know that your suited connectors are going to miss both the straight and the flush the overwhelming majority of the time, but you also know that whenever you hit one of those hands, you’re going to take down a huge pot and you’ll probably felt an opponent or two. If you have a healthy stack, making money on such nice implied odds hands should be a cinch.

Tournament play can sometimes be quite radically different from cash game play though. While most players acknowledge these differences, only the best of them actually take them into account when it comes to tournament strategy. That’s exactly why you’ll have a bunch of people playing their suited connectors the same way in a STT as they do in a cash game. If you’re one of these folks you may want to know that there’s a gaping hole in your strategy and you may want to plug it up as fast as possible.

You simply cannot play suited connectors the same way in tournaments and in cash games and here’s why: suited connectors as well as suited one-gappers and small pocket pairs (all excellent implied odds hands) lose a lot of value in STTs (and in MTTs as well).

First of all, as I’ve pointed it out above, playing suited connectors for their implied odds value only makes sense in deep-stacked situations. Now then, have you ever been in a STT which gave you a deep stack to begin with? Even if you manage to knock a few players out early on, the escalating blinds soon catch up with you and your “deep stack” evaporates before your very eyes. There is no such thing as being deep-stacked in a STT, so your suited connectors are no good here, at least not in the conventional way.

Should you then muck your suited connectors whenever you pick them up in your pocket? By no means. Suited connectors are playable in tourneys too, it’s just that you have to know when they have no value and when you can actually squeeze some juice out of them. Don’t limp along to see the flop on them, especially when you’re faced with aggressive opposition and a preflop raise is always in the book. Don’t call big bets after the flop, based on your weak gutshot straight draw. If you play like this, you’ll bleed your chips away much faster than you’d like to.

Pick the spot for your suited connector carefully. Position has a great deal of importance in determining their value. If you’re in late position you can limp along to see a cheap flop on them, or you can even attempt a blinds steal if the circumstances are right.

Your suited connectors (as well as your suited one gappers) are the most valuable in the early stages of an STT. That’s when you’re the deepest stacked all tourney long. Play your suited connectors from late position and limp into multi-way pots that remain unraised before the flop. Early position limping is a big no-no and it will cost you a lot if you decide to go down that road.

If you hit your hand or a draw which carries reasonable odds, act on it, if you miss your hand, just fold it right there.

In the mid-stages of the STT, your suited connectors lose further value. Limping on them becomes unprofitable and the only time you should take them to a flop is behind several other limpers from the button. By this stage though, suited connectors slowly emerge as a blinds-stealing hands.

As the blinds reach the higher levels, you should definitely use your suited connectors for stealing blinds, again – if possible from late position.

Sign up for rakeback before hitting the STT tables. You may not generate poker rake on each hand you play there, but you do pay tournament fees, and rakeback deals offer you a great rebate on them.

You’ve signed up to a poker room, made your first deposit, got your bonus, hit the cash tables and everything is going wonderfully. You win some you lose some, but at the end of the month you are always in the black. You’ve even signed up for a generous rakeback or poker propping deal and you are doing nicely. Why on earth would you ever want to change anything in this mechanism that works so well? The reason is simple: more money. A good poker player is always on the hunt for new ways to generate revenue, and if something works out fine, it is always considered the lead-up to something much bigger.

Massive online MTTs (the kind that Full Tilt Poker and PokerStars host on a weekly basis, are excellent sources of poker money. MTTs in general offer much better investment/potential revenue ratios than cash games and STTs put together. These MTTs offer a great opportunity for an online player to take down a prize which can potentially change his/her life for a relatively small buy-in.

I’m not saying that there’s little money in cash games. There’s plenty there as well, and the ultra-high limit games see entire fortunes change hands in a few orbits. The problem is that in order to play in these ultra high limit games, one needs to have an out-of-this-world bankroll, and very few people can afford to take that much money to the poker tables. It is safe to say that in order to win $100k, you need a minimum of $100k in theory, but in practice you need much more than that.

In order though to make the successful jump from cash poker to the tournament tables, you need to address a few issues regarding strategy. There are a few apparently minor differences between game mechanics that induce some extremely significant differences strategy-wise. This is why some good cash game players suck at tournament play and why some good tourney players never seem to be able to get it right at the cash tables.

For starters, you need to get used to the idea that your stack is a finite one in tournaments. In cash games – provided you are properly bankrolled – keeping your stack near the maximum levels is a question of re-buying whenever you lose, or simply keeping the money in the game whenever you win. In cash games, your stack is a weapon, but you can afford to throw it around because you can easily replace it if lost. In a tournament, you stack will still be a weapon, but it has a dual mission to fulfill here: it also represents your tournament life. Lose your stack and you’re out. There are tournaments which allow you to re-buy once or a few times, but these re-buy opportunities are not significant enough to downgrade the importance of your tournament stack to cash game levels. In tournaments, you need to wield the weapon that your stack is masterfully: you need to cause damage to your opponents with it, while keeping it unharmed in the same time.

This is the reason why you’ll have to give up certain marginal EV+ situations. In a cash game, you should always act on EV+, even if your value is marginal. In the long-run, you‘ll recover your losses anyway. In a tournament, there will be no long-run if you take a serious hit to your stack. You’ll have to avoid marginal EV+ situations in order to be able to exploit hands in which your EV+ is much more obvious down the line.

In tournaments, the blinds grow bigger as you level up. Now there’s a shocker: you can never actually rest on your laurels, you need to be continuously tweaking your strategy to adjust it to the requirements the relationship between the blind size and your stack size calls for. Dan Harrington has devised a system in this respect, which offers players strategy recommendations in various BB+SB-to-stack-size situations.

The rakeback deal for which you’ve signed up in order to recover rake at the cash tables works in tournaments too: it offers you a rebate on the tournament fees you pay.