Cash vs. Tournament Skill (Continued)

Wow. What a slew of comments on my question from yesterday of the amount of skill required in cash games vs. tournaments. In general, let me start off my own discussion of this question, originally posited by Wes in a comment to my post earlier this week, by saying that I am clearly in the camp that believes that neither form of poker requires "more" skill than the other. Rather, I view the different skills required in each kind of poker as more or less balancing each other out. I think there are a few good arguments on either side of the equation, but IMO most of the arguments people make on this point are not valid ones, and that's what I want to discuss briefly today. As this is still a vacation post I'm not going to go into nearly the detail I would like on most of these points, but generally speaking here are my thoughts on some of the most common arguments I hear in favor of either side of the cash / tournament equation.

First and foremost, I have to chuckle whenever I hear people make the argument that was made several times in yesterday's comments, that the escalating blinds and antes make tournament poker far easier in level of skill than cash games. I laugh at this because, from a purely logical perspective, I think that agrument cuts at least as well in favor of tournaments requiring more skill than it does cash games. Generally speaking, cash games require a consistent set of poker skills, hand in and hand out, without regard to the blinds forcing you to push with 92o. Very true. Nonetheless, if you think about it logically, tournaments require mostly the same set of consistent poker skills, plus they also require you to excel at short stack tournament play , big stack tournament play, and low-M tournament play. So, while I acknowledge that the argument is not quite a simple as I've just laid it out to be, as a general statement I think the blinds-and-antes thing is at least as strongly in favor of tournaments requiring an additional set of skills over and above cash game poker, as it is the other way around. In general I find that argument to be grossly misused by cash game guys in support of their own brand of poker being more of a "skill game".

Secondly, a number of the tournament guys in the comments mentioned that they find cash games much more challenging, and that thus they probably require more skills. While I am in the same boat as far as the perceived level of challenge involved in my donkeyrific cash game play (believe you me), that argument does not hold water from a basic logic perspective. Imagine if you've been playing and studying chess since you were 15 years old, but now you sit down to play checkers for one of the first times in your life and get crushed by your 12-year old brother. Does this mean that checkers requires more skill than chess? No. In fact that's a preposterous conclusion to draw, and yet that's exactly what some of the tournament-focused guys out there do when they say that they do worse in cash games than in tournaments (like I certainly do). Cash games clearly require a different set of skills than tournaments do, but to suggest that, just because you're good at tournaments but have trouble changing gears for cash games, cash games must require more skill, I think it's fair to say that that argument factually is flawed.

And this brings me to another point I saw a few times in the comments and want to refute here. One or two of the bloggers argued that cash needs more skill because you're playing with real money, and that there is a big difference between betting T$ 1000 and betting a thousand dollars of your actual cash on an actual hand. No doubt those two assertions are true abotu cash games vs. poker tournaments, but what is not at all accurate is that what follows logically from this is that cash therefore requires more skill. In fact, I'm not sure what more there even is to say about that argument, other than merely to point out that, purely logically speaking, there is simply no logical link between the whole "real money" point and the level of skill required to play the game. In other words, to use another analogy like the checkers-chess analogy above, if you were playing tournament no-limit holdem for a set buyin amount, and the guy next to you was playing our old kids-game War for actual cash, does that mean that the War game requires more skill than tournament nlh? I'll let you guys answer that one on your own. Suffice it to say, this argument just does not pass even the most basic logic test. And the exact same can be said about an argument that cash requires more skill just because the best cash gamers can make more money on average than the best tournament players can on average. While this may well be true (not sure how you go about proving an assertion like that either, but let's assume it's true because it really doesn't matter for purposes of this discussion), it simply has no factual relevance towards proving or even suggesting that cash requires more skill. Go back and read that War analogy if you don't see why.

Another point made multiple times in the comments yesterday was several people saying that it's easier for a cash game guy to learn to excel in tournaments than it is for a tournament guy to excel in cash games. More than a few people made this point yesterday and have made it several times in the past, and to this point all I can say is "prove it". This is an assertion which, if true, would at least go part of the way towards suggesting that cash game skill is greater than tournament skill. And yet strangely, nobody who makes this claim can actually prove it. It's just a generalization that some people say, and they'll throw in some examples of individuals in the world of poker for whom it is clearly true in practice, but that is a long, long way from an actual proof of anything. All I can say is this, which is a repeat of a point I made in Tuesday's post: there are plenty of poker players -- professionals on tv and poker bloggers alike -- who seem to be much, much better at cash games than at tournaments. And of course there are plenty of players for whom the reverse is true as well. So while this might be a good logical argument in favor of cash game skill if actually true, I just don't see how anyone can actually accept as true the basic premise of this argument in order to make the logical leap on the skill discussion.

Before I run back to the family let me just say that the argument in favor of cash game skill that moves me the most is the point about "more streets = more skill". Felicia has long made this argument, and I think there is some good logic to it. Not flawless, in that I could probably think of many games with more opportunities for betting but which do not carry the same level of skill as no-limit holdem, but I think there is something to the point nonetheless. Now, of course there are in fact the same four streets of betting in nlh whether you are playing cash or playing a poker tournament, but it is probably true that in at least most of the tournaments we tournament guys play in online, there is less turn and river play than in many cash games. To the extent this is true, I think this argument goes some of the way towards the cash vs. tournament skill debate. But my point here is, that argument is really more of a statement just that a game with more streets requires more skill, and not so much that cash games in general require more skill than tournaments. And as a few of the commenters yesterday suggest, in the case of comparing the skill required for a truly deep stacks tournament and a not-so-deep stacks cash game, this line begins to blur quite a bit.

So in all, for me, this is not an easy question to answer, and I am wholly not moved by most of the arguments made in favor of mroe skill required in cash games. I still maintain that it is a very different set of skills needed to excel in both, and I think some of the additional skills required in tournament poker tend to be discounted, if not completely overlooked, by cash game guys when they consider the relative skill requirements of each form of poker. If anyone has additional thoughts on this, or on the analogies or arguments I've made in today's post, I'd love to hear them as always.

I'm going to try to get a post up on Thursday, but that is a travel day for the Hammer Family so I'm not 100% sure I will have the time for a proper post before our flight leaves to return back to the icy Northeast. That said I will definitely be back in my usual timeslot on Friday with another fun poker post for you all, and if I'm really lucky I will get to play in Al's Riverchasers tournament at 9pm ET on Thursday night to get back into the swings of things poker-wise after some much-needed and much-appreciated time off.