No limit tournament poker is far more popular than cash-games in general and limit-games in particular. As many as 75% of the players online, at any given time, may be engaged in tournament holdem of some variety. Having played enough tournaments, it is easier to make the shift into the no-limit world. No-limit is the most popular of all cash games.
Thanks to media exposure, it is tournaments that inexperienced and nave players often choose to join and where they are easy to sportively exploit. You can find free-roll tournaments at almost any time, which makes them convenient for cautious novices to try a few games without deposit and perhaps make a few lucky wins to support the beginning of their poker careers.
In a sit-and-go tournament game, the player enters with a fixed deposit and then only plays for chips, not money. This makes for a much less stressful game than the cash game. This relaxing nature accounts for its popularity as well as media coverage, and one may even gain his 15 minutes of fame as a celebrity poker player..
However, it is important to distinguish frequent and quick SnG tournaments and the rarer MTT where each game may take a stressfully long time. During an MTT, a player cannot leave without loosing everything he has invested; which means the necessity to endure long hours of difficult play. Such games take determination and endurance; otherwise, it is easy to lapse into despair, unwilling to leave, yet unable to concentrate and play well. Matters are complicated by high dispersion, though the final three players at the table have a lot going for them.
Also, you can’t expect to walk into a poker club and find an MTT going on. Even in online poker rooms, you may find yourself only able to play very late at night, depending on your country of play. The literature available on tournaments and no-limit games tends to be scarce and dwells on the psychological and subjective aspects of the game rather than any precise techniques and strategies.
It is not that difficult to transition from cash to MTT. There is a close resemblance between them Actually, there are less drawbacks to cash games than to MTT. Lots of players are of the opinion that no-limit cash games offer more capability to foresee results than in any of the other online games. It is in any case the easiest form of the cash game to find on the net with an abundance of players on fire to join a game and come out as huge winners. Because there is so little written about it, there is ample opportunity for the talented player to use their skills of perception to successfully manipulate their less talented opponents.
The literature on cash games appears to grow in quantity, but even when it is of good quality, it is imprecise, lacks concrete universal guidelines, heavily dependent on the specific assortment of individual human potential at any given table. There is no way to “master” no-limit cash games without playing a lot and taking care to study your opponents meticulously every time, accumulating a wealth of memory (if not of cash) from which to draw creatively (i.e. without much certainty of success) in unpredictable future games.
No limit games offer the fiercest dispersion for even good players. Experts have been known to lose five or six buy-ins in one round of play. This is not a cheap game or one for the faint of heart..
The author is a successful limit cash game player. He plays poker online and receives Rakeback at Gutshot Poker and Rakeback at Betfair Poker.