Fast Money: Cash Games or Tournaments?
If you are reading this article, you are probably a seasoned poker player who has been around the block. But you keep asking – Which will make me more money quickly? Will it be cash games or tournaments?
Let’s start off with what each of them is and we can make comparisons from there.
Cash Games vs. Tournament Poker
- Cash games are played on one table. Tournaments can be played on one table but can also consist of multiple tables.
- In cash games players exchange money for chips, and there is usually a minimum and maximum buy-in amount, depending on the stakes. In tournaments, players buy-in for the same amount and are all usually given the same amount of tournament chips.
- A player has the option to quit a cash game at anytime, and can then exchange any chips for cash by withdrawal, but in tournaments it end when there is one winner who has all the chips. Players are paid based on where they finished in the tournament.
- In Real cash games the blinds stay the same for each hand, depending on the stakes (e.g. 100/200). In tournaments the cost of the blinds varies (e.g. increase every 15 mins or time level according to the tournament format).
- If you lose your chips/money in a cash game then you may buy-in again and continue playing. If you lose all your chips in a tournament, you’re done and are out of the game (unless you rebuy).
- In cash games you can use rebuy when your stake seems to be low but not reach to zero, but in cash games you can rebuy once you bust out all your starting chips.
Poker tournaments are quite self-explanatory, they are tournaments which are run by a poker website or organization, either online or in real life where there is usually a buy-in (a set amount of money you have to pay to participate) and a payout structure, based on what ranking you end up in. Needless to say, the higher you rank, the higher the reward will be.
Tournaments are great because they are relatively low risk and potentially high reward. Strong players are able to benefit off this kind of structure greatly because if they are consistently ranking highly in the tournament, then most likely they will be winning more money than they are spending to buy-in to the tournament.
Khelo365 runs several tournaments running with prize pools in the thousands to the hundreds of thousands such as the Raise Deep Stack and the Twister tournaments to name a couple. Tournaments are being run every single day, you can check out the details of the tournaments as well as the requirements here.
Cash Games:
Cash Games are regular Poker games that you can play at any time at Khelo365. The buy-in limits and stakes have varying amounts, once you decide to buy into the game you join a vacant table and play against other players with your chips. The amount you are able to win it total dependent on you, the more you win the more money you will receive – a very straightforward system, right?
And unlike the tournaments, you can decide to leave at any time and walk away with your riches. Cash Games are high-risk, high-reward. The more you decide to bet, the higher the earnings you can receive from the Cash games. Also, unlike a tournament, you do not have to wait until the end of the tournament to receive your reward, it is an incredibly fast method if you are looking to win it big in Poker.
If we had to choose one option to answer the question, which will make you money more quickly, then it would probably be the Cash Games. This is simply because playing fast games on the Cash Tables with high stakes is one of the biggest rewarding mediums possible in poker, where many millions can be won and lost in the space of a few hands.