What do crushers do differently at final tables?

Not as much as you would think, says Dara O' Kearney. Elite poker is the art of not making big mistakes...

One of the most effective ways to study ICM is to watch final table replays with hole card coverage on YouTube. New PokerStars final tables with all the hole cards shown are uploaded every week.

It's simple, you watch the final table and when a player you know to be good does something unexpected, you run the spot to work out why.

I tell my students to do this all the time and they always come back with the same response...

"They just played standard".

This is the big surprise about watching elite poker players. They often play straightforwardly at final tables.

It's TV poker's fault we think otherwise. We see edited highlights of the one insane hero call of the whole game, and we assume top-level poker players have a swashbuckling style where they put their chips in the middle at every opportunity.

The art of fewer mistakes

What really separates great tournament players from the rest is simply not making big mistakes.

To quote Napoleon, military genius was "the man who can do the average thing when all those around him are going crazy".

The best players in the world make fewer mistakes at final tables because they have run the spots over and over again.

They don't make huge ICM punts because they understand their incentives and they understand concepts like Risk Premium.

Knowing this should be a relief to most players, you don't need to be a genius, you just need to be able to identify and fix your biggest leaks to improve at poker. 

You can get Dara's free book on effective poker study by joining his mailing list.