Are MTTs tougher than cash games?

Last week the big poker Twitter debate was when Ryan Laplante declared that MTTs are more complex and tougher than cash games to master. 

Probably going to get some flack for this, but:#Poker Tournaments are much more complex and difficult to learn than cash games.

They are much more mentally taxing, harder psychologically, and harder to play professionally.

Live or online.

— Ryan Laplante🏳️‍🌈 (@Protentialmn) November 21, 2024

Generally speaking if you made this statement in poker circles just a few years ago you would get laughed at by the cash game players. There had been a broad feeling in the poker world that tournaments, by comparison, are checkers to cash game’s chess. This is no doubt because we have recreational players becoming world champions in tournaments whereas no casual player could ever profit from the highest stakes cash games over the long term.

In more recent years I think the sentiment has shifted more towards Laplante’s viewpoint. It’s one I completely agree with. 

Deeper stacks vs more moving parts

Any single hand in cash game poker is almost certainly more complex because the stacks are deeper. 100-200 big blind effective stacks are tougher to play than 30 big blind stacks because you have more options in terms of bet sizings and usually have to play all the streets. 

However, tournaments have so many more moving parts to them, you have to learn so many more things. You have to learn how to play deep stacks, medium stacks, short stacks and micro stacks. You have to learn about ICM and bubble pressure. You have to learn lots more formats like PKOs and satellites. You need to know how to play full ring, short handed and heads-up. You have to factor in more non-playing decisions like late registering and deal-making. From a mental game perspective, you have to be able to play better for longer without being able to take a break or quit when you are not playing well, not to mention dealing with the tilt of busting and not being able to play anymore.

MTTs are clearly much tougher from a variance perspective. Good players can have losing years in MTTs, which is much less of an issue in cash games. It seems apparent that more MTT players go broke and/or end up in large amounts of makeup. There are also more costs, for example travelling to events.

MTT players have more volatility

Cash game players get to pick when they play, they can live where the good games are etc. They have more consistency in their lives, even things like reliable rakeback making up part of their income. 

In a cash game, each individual hand has so many more potential branches on the decision tree, but the same spots come up over and over again. In a tournament, you often will find yourself in spots that have never come up before. Having KK in the cutoff in the early blind levels is different to having KK in the cutoff on the bubble, having KK in the cutoff two places off the final table with 25 big blinds is different to having KK in the cutoff as a micro stack at the final table with a disconnected Small Blind, and so on.

The point I am making is that a good cash game player will have seen the same tough spots come up often enough that they can automate a lot of their decision-making. They will often know the right thing to do from experience. The same is much less true for a tournament player and a much greater element of thinking on their feet and improvisation is required, albeit for an often easier spot in terms of the number of branches on a decision tree.

Tougher players but easier to solve?

This is probably why Real Time Assistance is more of a threat in cash games than it is MTTs. The reason a ‘Dream Machine’ can work is because it can easily access similar spots to the hand being played because it has so many to access. This doesn’t mean MTTs are immune to RTAs, far from it, but there are just so many more variables to filter in a ‘Dream Machine’.

The same comparison can be made between chess and poker. Chess is in theory easier to beat than poker because there are fewer variables in play. This is why chess was solved by an AI some 20 years before the same thing started to happen in poker. Poker is a greater test of ‘General Intelligence’ than chess because it requires more reflexive thinking.

Finally, the consistent biggest winners in MTTs are probably the best players in the world. If you look at the all-time money list, for example, I suspect the top 20 includes 15 of the best players in poker. The biggest winners in cash games might not even be particularly great, they just manage to get invites to the softest high stakes games (managing the politics of private games is a skill in itself, however). 

Tournaments a much tougher than cash games, that’s why the winners sometimes get nice shiny bracelets. 

Are MTTs tougher than cash games to master? Let us know in the comments: