Message Board : Risk vs. Reward - Question for Ed

Hi Ed,
 
I just sent this to your email box after my response to your response in the Ides of March article failed to post properly.  After doing so, I discovered that you probably prefer to get messages here, so I apologize for that.  Anyway…

I can certainly appreciate the idea of needing to maintain interest by playing in games where the amount to be won is something you care about.  As a recent adopter of cash game play with a starting bankroll on Stars of $500, I found this article particularly interesting.  Your comments bring to light another issue I’ve been dealing with lately though.  See, I’m having some trouble telling myself to get involved in cash game play from a risk vs. reward standpoint.  Consider the following:
 
I can buy into a $10 180-man SNG and potentially win $520 for a few hours work.  If I play badly, get unlucky, or for any other reason bust from this tournament, I lose absolutely no more than that original $10 investment.
 
If I take that same $10 and buy into a $10NL cash game though, my few hours work will produce (at best) a profit of maybe ten or twenty bucks.  If I want a chance at a few hundred dollars for my time, I have to play $50 or even $100NL.  So in order to win money that means something to me in a cash game, I must in turn risk money that also means something to me.
 
And thus we’ve arrived at a paradox.  In order for me to have a chance at making an amount of money that interests me, I find myself playing with an amount of money that I am slightly uncomfortable with losing.  And though I can’t speak to any specific occurrences, I find it hard to believe that this fact isn’t affecting my play.  I started this year with $500 to play cash games and a goal to turn it into $10000.  Aside from the fact that you are almost certainly a wildly more talented player than I am, I find it both exciting and yet disconcerting that you’ve had such a seemingly fun and simple time of multiplying your bankroll so far.  On the contrary, I seem to be floundering in my attempts to figure out why my roll isn’t budging.  I have an ROI for tournaments that’s so good that most would call it ridiculous, and have been studying the game intensely for a few years now, so I believe I’m capable of being a winning player at this.  But I just can’t seem to get my feet off the ground in cash games.  Any advice you have on that subject, be it direct or via an article, would be vastly appreciated.
 
Thanks so much for all that you do for students of the game,
 
TFGoose

I think the differences between tournaments and cash games is vastly overstated.  Most tournaments play like cash games until well over half the field is eliminated.  There is more short stack play in tournaments, but if you shortstack cash games, the strategy will be similar to tournament strategy with those effective stacks.  If the starting stack is 100BB in an MTT, the strategy I’d use would be very similar to a cash game where everybody had 100bb. 

TFGoose I think your losing in cash games could be bad luck.  100000 hand  breakeven stretches happen even for players that win 6 big blinds/100 hands, and a 50k hand breakeven stretch is definitley realistic for a cash game player that wins at that rate.  It is also possible you are passing up some +EV decisions because of how high you are playing, or your tournament background where sometimes it is good to wait for a better spot.