Tournament poker players have it easy, it is quite rare that they have to play deep stacked of 100BB or more and especially online where levels are very quick and a 100BB stack is soon only around 20-30BB. This is why many tournament players cannot hack it in cash games and cash games do require a higher skill level for sure. I am not saying that tournament players are weaker because a cash game reg who didn’t have enough gamble would not have the game to win or final table in huge fields, it is just that they are vastly different disciplines.
Mastering how to play a deep stack isn’t easy and this makes NLHE ring games more akin to financial trading than anything else. You can record a very high strike rate of winning trades to losing trades just like you can winning pots to losing pots but if you are only winning tiny amounts but losing huge amounts when you do lose then it becomes very difficult to become a net winner. The post UIGEA environment on major sites like www.pokerstars.co.uk in online poker has made it very difficult to make money and in six max then the effect is even more pronounced where very few players are recording significant ptbb/100 figures over large sample sizes anymore.
So what is the answer…..well a short stack professional system is one such answer because if you want to make money online these days then you need to often stop “playing poker” in the conventional sense. Playing a short stack in 2012 is far different to how users played a short stack pre-2006. It isn’t a simple case of waiting for good cards and shoving and being +EV. Too many people know that just like too many people know the tight-loose style in SNG’s…..they simply don’t work anymore. Playing a short stack these days requires far more.
