Refusing to do a "Moya"

Whilst having my tooth extracted on Saturday, I was mulling over the content of Fluke’s recent blog post, where he talks about the striking difference between tournament play and cash play (http://extremepoker.co.uk/). He, in fact, suffers from the opposite problem that I have in that he has great patience, tenacity and reading abilities in cash games, but perhaps doesn’t change gears quick enough and suffers from lack of agression in the tournament arena. Of course, he doesn’t suffer from the significant blow outs on the cash tables I have, due to impatience/excess aggression/drunkeness/all of the above.

I am starting to wonder, whether tournament and cash games are in fact completely different disciplines, and whether it is possible to be truely strong in both arenas. There are numerous professional players who follow the tournament circuit, expecting to make most of their money from the cash tables. There are similarly many successful pro tournament players, who squander fortunes on the cash tables. How many are true masters of both arts? Ivey, Antonius and Negreanu spring to mind, but not too many others.

On a smaller scale you can take the Loose Cannon. For example: Sir Mike, Jody, Geoff, Briony and Volcano are all strong tournament players. Fluke, Maltese Mike, Deven and McDee are strong cash players. Only arguably Tom, Sonny and Jason make the transition between the two disciplines successfully.

I didn’t used to think the difference was so marked, but now I think it is similar to the difference between high level grass court and clay court tennis. If you consider the following match ups, from down the years:

Pete Sampras v Carlos Moya
Andy Roddick v Guilermo Coria
Greg Rusedski v Jaun Inacio Chela

If you played these three matches (when all players were at their prime) on grass, the first named player would win probably 99 times out of 100. However, make them play on the clay of Roland Garros, and you would get the exact opposite outcome - the surface really makes this big a difference.

The analogy even works for the styles of the two games. A break in grass usually means the end of the set. In clay there will usually be opportunities to break back, similar to being able to reach into your wallet and reload at a cash game after making a marginal decision. Clay courters grind patiently from the back of the court waiting for an opening to pounce, much like a cash players, whereas tournament aggression reflects the crash bang wallop of grass court tennis, where serves and volleys are key. Finally a grass court match is relatively quick, whereas clay court matches regularly go on for five hours plus - 4am at the Loose Cannon anyone? ;o)

Where this analogy is useful is as follows. Whilst all of the above players knew their own limitations, there were some remarkable differences in attitude. Sampras would pitch up at the French Open year after year without fail, even though he knew he was on a hiding to nothing. However, Carlos Moya used to continually pick up a “hamstring pull” every time Wimbledon was on, and only recently even attempted to play on the grass.

I was pretty close to throwing my toys out of the pram last week after yet another live cash loss, and deciding that I would just play tournaments. (Note that, for me, online cash is different to live cash in that you can multi table, and following an ABC poker style pretty much guarantees profit at certain levels. Is online cash the equivalent of hard court tennis perhaps!!??)

Anyhow, as I sat there in the dentist chair, I decided that I really must try and apply myself to live cash games, even if I feel it’s a negative expected value for me at the moment. If that is still the case in a year, then perhaps it will be time to shift to the tournament only approach, adopted by several players. I have reclassified the categories of my P&L to help this analysis.

In the meantime, the key is to adopt the Sampras mentality towards clay, rather than the Moya mindset to the grass…