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.