Chaos Theory
In any poker tournament, you’re given a set of information about the hands you’re dealt and the players you play, but let’s get out of that single table box and think of the other players.
During the course of a tournament, there will be several thousand hands most likely that you’ll have no direct influence in, on your own table and on others. But these hands will have a direct influence on how you play your game later in the tournament. On a logical level it makes perfect sense. The player at table 6 that’s getting dealt AA, KK and the likes and is building a big stack early, is inevitably going to have an effect on how you play him later in the tournament when you meet up.
And this same theory can hold true to you if you’re the big stack and you’re playing small stacks. You’ll be in the same scenario. It’s the indirect effect, known as chaos theory.
In an unpredictable world where events happening in other places effect events seemingly unrelated at other places, this is tantamount to understand when thinking about online poker at the meta-game level.
So how do you apply this? Well you use the lobby online, and see the big stacks, and you start to formulate your strategy based on the stacks ahead on top of the table you’re already playing. If you want to compete with a viable stack, and you have 2000 chips and someone has 20k chips, you’re going to have to do some serious winning before you meet that stack.
We call it variance, but really it’s just the chaotic nature of tournaments where other people affect you even though they’re not at your table. Remember this when you play poker online.
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