If you’ve stumbled upon this article, there are two things that can be ascertained with a pretty high level of certainty. The first one is that you’re familiar with ClubWPT, its subscription poker model, and the kind of games they offer on the platform.
The second reason that may have landed you on this page is the feeling that your results on the site aren’t quite as good as you’d like them to be — despite seemingly playing better than most other players.
Do you get the feeling that some of the things people do on ClubWPT just don’t make sense, and they’re playing almost as if they want to give their chips away? Your assessment isn’t wrong, but you have to understand that with such a low cost to enter tournaments, players on the site will act much differently than if they had to pay a buy-in for every event they enter.
For $27.95 a month, which is the price of a VIP membership (and you can even get it for free by sending a simple postcard), you get to play dozens of tournaments every month. If you bust one event, you can just register for the next one — it’s not like it’s costing you anything extra.
This is why so many players on ClubWPT adopt this very reckless style of play, where they try to get lucky and accumulate chips quickly, or they bust and move on to the next one. The question is, what can you do about it, and how can you take advantage of this clearly sub-optimal strategy?
Back to Basics
If you’ve been playing poker for some time, you’ve probably learned a lot about strategy. You know about ranges, delayed continuation bets, overbets, range merging, and all that cool stuff. And while some may disagree, I’d say you should put all that aside when playing at ClubWPT and go back to the bare basics.
Your elaborate bluffs will not work because 90% of your opponents aren’t thinking about your hand or what you might be representing. They’re fixated on the absolute value of their holdings and will make decisions based on that information alone.
You are surprised that your 3x pot bet got called on the river by a third pair? It happens, and it happens a lot, simply because the fear of busting isn’t there — especially not during early stages when you can just go out and fire up another tournament.
There are two ways you can go about this. You can get mad and frustrated that this is not “real poker,” or you can understand the environment you’re playing in and adjust accordingly.
Go back to basics and adopt a very exploitable style, where you don’t get involved with marginal hands (unless you’re getting insanely good odds), you bluff very little and go for full value with your big hands.
In a game where someone’s going to call off their entire stack with a second pair or a gutshot draw when you have the nuts, why try and be fancy? If most players are playing level one poker, just go to level two, and you’re good. Otherwise, you run the risk of out-leveling yourself.
Know When to Switch Gears
While most players in ClubWPT tournaments will play this crazy and reckless style during the early stages, many of them will start to tighten up and dial down on aggression and craziness as the tournament field dwindles down and the prize bubble approaches.
Having invested a few hours of their time and being so close to getting some kind of return on that investment, many players will not want to go out before that bubble bursts, no matter what.
Of course, this philosophy applies to all MTTs and it is not specific to ClubWPT, but recreational players often put too much of an emphasis on getting past the bubble even if the reward for doing so is relatively small. They’ll do it even at a cost of severely reducing their chances of making the final table, which is where the best prizes are.
You need to be aware of this dynamic and recognize these players at your table. Attack their blinds and put them in tough spots, knowing that they’ll rather fold and keep the chips they have than put it all on the line with a marginal hand.
This isn’t a foolproof strategy, of course, as there is always the possibility of someone deciding this is the hill they’ll die on and punting off their stack with a weak hand after folding in many better spots. For the most part, however, this approach will help you build up your stack and put you in a great spot once the bubble bursts.
Embrace the Variance
Even with all this, you’ll often end up busting to a weird bad beat or to someone who decided they had to keep you honest no matter what. That’s just the nature of these games, where the natural variance that comes with poker is multiplied three or four times.
When you find yourself on a bad streak, it’s not going to be fun, but try to look past it. Good and bad runs are part of poker, and especially of tournament poker. Regardless of the type of players you’re up against, you’ll bust a majority of tournaments you play — there’s no way around it.
As long as you’re making right choices and end up with better hands when cards are turned over, you’re doing it right, and the variance will even itself out eventually. And when it does, you’ll end up building some massive stacks and booking a few wins that will make it all worthwhile.
In case you don’t have a ClubWPT account just yet and you stumbled upon this article wanting to prepare for what lies ahead, we have some good news for you. If you sign up with our exclusive code FUSEVIP by 11:59 EST pm March 31, you’ll receive one month of VIP membership free, plus you’ll get a seat in an exclusive freeroll on April 1 where the winner will receive a $5,000 package to play in the WPT Choctaw Championship event.
