Thoughts on No-Limit Hold'em

Survive:
The
Prime
Directive

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Thoughts
on No-Limit
Holdem

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by Walt Nelson

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Survive: the Prime Directive
(Page 2)

I was short-stacked the remainder of the tournament, but somehow I managed to survive. I made the final table and then, in rapid succession, the 10th, 9th, and 8th place finishers were eliminated. On the hand when #8 was eliminated, I had posted the small blind and had less than 200 chips left - but still, I finished 7th out of 1,050 participants! My prize: $3,480.00.

I wish that I could say that I learned the Prime Directive from that experience and lived happily ever after - but sadly, I didn't "get it." Not until many months had passed, and I had played more than a thousand additional no-limit tournaments (including single-table sit & go tourneys), did I figure out the lesson that could be learned from that 7th place finish.

Finally, I did "get it:" accumulating chips is nice, and accumulating chips is necessary; but what really wins the money in tournaments is surviving - outlasting the other players. I finally understood that "Survive" is the Prime Directive.

This insight gives a whole new meaning to the old saying, "All you need is a chip and a chair." Most poker players interpret this saying to mean that as long as you have one chip, you have a chance of winning enough hands to turn that one chip into hundreds, thousands, and finally, enough chips to win the tournament. But I interpret that saying to mean that you can win any place in a tournament except first place with a single chip; all you have to do is outlast the other players - in other words, to Survive.

As long as you have a chip and a chair, you can finish in the money.

Early Chip Leaders Usually Don't Win

Let's look at the prime directive from another angle: did you ever notice the number of times that the early chip leader, who was leading the field by many thousands of chips, was eliminated early in the tournament and didn't even finish in the money?

I first became aware of this phenomenon while reading the book Championship Hold'em by T.J.

Cloutier and Tom McEnvoy. T.J. and Tom explain why the early chip leaders seldom win tournaments:

"The way these players get their chips is by [calling too many hands], sucking out, getting lucky, and when that luck goes away they don't know how to play.

"They acquire chips early by playing loose, gambling with a lot of marginal hands, but they forget to shut down when their luck runs out and move on to some other type of play."

* Championship Hold'em by T.J. Cloutier and Tom McEnvoy, Cardsmith Publishing, copyright 2000, (revised 2002), page 216

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After I read that, I started observing: whenever I played a tournament, I followed the progress of the early chip leaders - and in a large percentage of the cases, it happened exactly the way T.J. and Tom said: the early tournament leader did not even finish in the money.

Time after time I watched this happen: I noticed that many of the early chip leaders never even came close to finishing in the money! This was an amazing revelation; I had always been envious of the people who jumped out to an early chip lead; I was wishing I could do that. So it came as quite a surprise to me when I discovered that, in many cases, I finished higher in the tournament than they did!

Now I was completely convinced: the key skill was not "accumulating chips," it was "Surviving."

The Common Thread
Slowly, I began to realize that most of those early-chip-leaders in no-limit holdem tournaments had one thing in common: they liked to go for big pots by risking all or most of their chips in lots of hands. As I watched more and more tournaments, I gradually understood the problem with that strategy:

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