There are many differences with regards to comparing tournament poker and ring game poker but the various similarities also make the comparison intriguing. One of the big factors behind why many novices struggle in either environment is to do with adapting to a totally different way of playing poker! In tournament poker then you are rarely playing a large stack in relation to how many big blinds that you have in that stack. What this means is that you often will not be able to get experience of playing deep stacked situations and this is not the best preparation for playing deep stacked in ring games.

Another factor in why some ring game players struggle playing tournaments is to do with tournament speed. The blinds increase periodically and very rapidly as with the case of online poker tournaments. With rapidly increasing blinds then your chances of accumulating chips based on skill is severely limited. This basically limits your ability to be able to grind chips like you can in ring games.

So the knock on effect of this is that you simply have to take risks albeit calculated ones to do well and place well in online poker tournaments. If you cannot take risks or push the barriers of how you play then you are very unlikely to see final tables or reach the serious pay off seats. The best tournament players in the world simply do not play for minor cashes as they do not compensate for the buy-ins over the long haul.

It is difficult for many tournament players on a psychological level to risk their tournament life when they only have one of it. However this is the wrong way to look at it as all forms of poker irrespective of what they are should be looked at with a long term view. You simply cannot look at poker tournaments with a short term view if you have aspirations of playing them seriously. This means that you really should be setting aside a bankroll or an amount of money that offers you the chance of playing without fear of being eliminated from any one particular tournament.

This is the biggest factor for me in why serious players make money from non serious players. Non serious players or novices or amateurs or whatever you want to call them tend to play individual tournaments on a tournament by tournament basis. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with this. However it does make it more likely that you will play with more fear when you are looking at an individual tournament not as a series of tournaments or as one tournament out of a bankroll of a hundred tournament buy-ins.

If you cannot get yourself into this mindset then ring games may be better suited to your character and personality although you need to look at ring games in the same way as well and not treat one buy-in as if it is a life or death situation.