What cardrooms hope you will do after you bust out of a tournament is hop into a live game, a cash game for which the cardroom rakes, collects a button charge, or charges time. Even though cardrooms do make money via the entry fees they charge for their tournaments, they don't (with very rare exceptions) make anywhere near the amount per player per seat that they do in a live game.
Because of this economic reality, if tournament players did not hop into live games after tournaments were over, we would have considerably fewer tournaments. This is one of the reasons why you don't see many independent promoters holding tournaments. The last prominent one was the Tournament of Champions, an event in which the promoters made money from entry fees and The Orleans Hotel and Casino got the drop from the live games. The Tournament of Champions is no longer around.
Clearly, hopping into live games is good for the cardrooms, and inasmuch as poker players and cardrooms are not enemies, but partners, if all else comes out equal, it would be a good thing for poker if the majority of tournament players would head for the live-game area after they bust out.
While it is important for you to be concerned about what's good for poker, if you are to survive, you probably need to place your own economic realities ahead of what is generally good for the game. The question thus becomes, "Is it a good idea for me to hop into a live game right after I've busted out of a tournament?"
Like most complex questions, the answer to this one is, "It depends." The variables in this poker equation are:
1. How strong are you at money poker vs. tournament poker?
2. How easy is cardroom access for you (that is, does it involve a long drive)?
3. What kinds of games are available to you after you bust out?
4. What is your emotional state after you bust out?
Whether you are intelligently hopping into a likely profitable situation, or crossing your fingers and hoping your luck will change, depends on how you can answer these different questions, so let's look at each of them in more detail.
1. How strong are you at money poker vs. tournament poker? Few players are equally skilled in both arenas. If you're a better money player than tournament player, this one's a no-brainer. If, as is the case with many tournament specialists, you are not as good at money poker as you are at tournaments, you should probably ask yourself if the money game into which you're hopping is one that you would enter on a day when you just went to play money poker. If the answer is no, you know what you should do.
2. How easy is cardroom access for you (that is, does it involve a long drive)? If you drove 90 minutes to enter the tournament and busted out after a relatively short time, there's a strong case for not "wasting” all that driving time, and getting in some live action. If you live 10 minutes from the cardroom, you can make the decision without considering the time investment you’ve made in getting there.
3. What kinds of games are available to you after you bust out? Game selection is one of the most important aspects of successful money play, and many players don't give it nearly enough thought. Generally, an intermediate can make more money playing against beginners than a world champion can make against advanced but slightly less-skilled fellow pros. If the cardroom is large, you'll probably have your choice of a significant number of different games, and you can move around until you find one you like. In a small cardroom, you'll have fewer options.
The good news about game selection on tournament days is that the games are full of folks who share your situation: They've just busted out of a tournament. Players who have busted out tend — I repeat, tend — to be in a "get my entry fee back" frame of mind, or in a bad mood because they busted out. They tend to be feeling unlucky because usually they think they were unlucky to bust out. Most of the time, such folks are desirable opponents, which leads me to the fourth and most important variable
…
4. What is your emotional state after you bust out? If you're one of those tilt-free types who can shrug off a tournament defeat with ease, you're in good shape. If you do have that attitude, it's probably in part because you understand that even for a real champion, the odds just on making the final table aren't good, never mind winning. You also understand that luck is part of poker and that if you seem to take more than your "fair share" of bad beats, it's because you're getting your money in as the favorite more often than your competitors. If you get your money in with the best of it, you can't put a bad beat on someone else: It can only happen to you. You will, of course, win much more frequently by getting your money in with the best of it!
If, on the other hand, you understand these concepts on an intellectual level but have a difficult time dealing with the realities on an emotional level, you're probably one of those players who make the money games more desirable on tournament days.
You don't necessarily have to go home if you know yourself to be one of these emotional players, although that's certainly a good option if you live close to the casino. For lots of people, a cooling-off period is enough. Take time for a meal (it's far better for your health to eat a leisurely meal in a restaurant than to gulp down food hurriedly at a table, anyway), or sit in a lounge and watch a ballgame. If you want to stay focused on poker during your cool-down phase, use the time to review your play in the tournament.
When reviewing, don't focus solely on the hands you lost, although they are more likely sources of mistakes you can learn from. You can hold a very useful postmortem on the hands you won, too, perhaps realizing that you didn't extract the maximum number of chips from a winning hand, or that you won because you got lucky, or that you won because you played the hand very well.
By the time you've finished your postmortem, not only will you have probably cooled down from any tilt factor you might have been feeling about your loss, you also will have a much better picture of whether you are "on your game" on that particular day. If it turns out that you are playing well, the money games are right there. If you aren't, they’ll be there another day.
Hot Right Now sponsored by:
The prime rule in poker is: don't try to beat the other players; let them try to beat you. This isn't just an introductory sentence; it is probably more important than all the tips and hints that follow. Do yourself a favor by memorizing it.
