Is it harder to be an elite player in cash games or MTTs?

An age old question once again posed for the GTO era, which games are tougher to excel in? Tournies or cash games?

If you follow poker wunderkind Landon Tice on Twitter he has a lot of funny polls and musings. Last week he asked a simple question that will forever be debated but is worth exploring now and then. 

Which is more difficult to become?

— Landon (@LandonTice) March 11, 2021

Generally speaking if you ask this question in poker circles you would get laughed at by the cash game players. There has been a broad feeling in the poker world that tournaments, by comparison, are checkers to cash game’s chess. This is no doubt because we have recreational players becoming world champions in tournaments whereas no casual player could ever profit from the highest stakes cash games over the long term.

I was quite surprised cash games didn't win by a much bigger margin in the poll to be honest. A lot of people in the comments acknowledged the arguments for MTT players instead, which I am about to make.

Bigger game tree vs more moving parts

Any single hand in cash game poker is almost certainly more complex because the stacks are deeper. 100-200 big blind effective stacks are tougher to play than 30 big blind stacks because you have more options in terms of bet sizings and usually have to play all the streets. A tournament player who moves onto cash is going to have a tougher start to the game than the other way around.

However, tournaments have so many more moving parts to them, you have to learn so many more things. You have to learn how to play deep stacks, medium stacks, short stacks and micro stacks. You have to learn about ICM and bubble pressure. You have to learn lots more formats like PKOs and satellites. You need to know how to play full ring, short handed and heads-up. You have to factor in more non playing decisions like late registering and deal making. From a mental game perspective you have to be able to play better for longer without being able to take a break or quit when you are not playing well, not to mention dealing with the tilt of busting and not being able to play anymore.

In a cash game each individual hand has so many more potential branches on the decision tree, but the same spots come up over and over again. In a tournament you often will find yourself in spots that have never come up before. Having KK in the cutoff in the early blind levels is different to having KK in the cutoff on the bubble, having KK in the cutoff two places off the final table with 25 big blinds is different to having KK in the cutoff as a micro stack at the final table with a disconnected Small Blind, and so on.

The point I am making is that a good cash game player will have seen the same tough spots come up often enough that they can automate a lot of their decision making. They will often know the right thing to do from experience. The same is much less true for a tournament player and a much greater element of thinking on their feet and improvisation is required, albeit for an often easier spot in terms of number of branches on a decision tree.

Tougher players but easier to solve?

This is probably why Real Time Assistance is more of a threat in cash games than it is MTTs. The reason a ‘Dream Machine’ can work is because it can easily access similar spots to the hand being played because it has so many to access. This doesn’t mean MTTs are immune to RTAs, far from it, but there are just so many more variables to filter in a ‘Dream Machine’.

The same comparison can be made between chess and poker. Chess is in theory easier to beat than poker because there are less variables in play. This is why chess was solved by an AI some 20 years before the same thing started to happen in poker. Poker is a greater test of ‘General Intelligence’ than chess because it requires more reflexive thinking.

Does that mean elite poker players are more advanced than chess grandmasters? Not at all. If we are to judge the two based on which one exerts the most brainpower I would suspect it was the chess players. The game is much more evolved and has been around so much longer, it suggests to me that chess is tougher at the higher levels. But if you got the same AI to start from scratch with both games, poker would be harder for it to master by an order of magnitude.

I think the same is true for cash game players vs tournament players. I suspect the best players in the world right now are cash game players but if you taught a genius how to play poker from scratch, tournaments would be the tougher pursuit in which to become a ‘grandmaster’.

Are MTTs tougher than cash games to master? Let us know in the comments: