The web economy blog

Archive for May, 2010

This week, at TechCrunch Disrupt, we’re announcing the launch of Publish2 News Exchange, a platform aimed at disrupting the Associated Press monopoly over content distribution to newspapers. With Publish2 News Exchange, newspapers can replace the AP’s obsolete cooperative with direct content sharing and replace the AP’s commodity content with both free, high-quality content from the Web and content from any paid source.

With Publish2 News Exchange, we’ve created what the AP should have become, but can’t because of a classic Innovator’s Dilemma. The New AP is an open, efficient, scalable news distribution platform. We’re enabling newspapers to benefit for the first time from the disruptive power of the Web, and from the efficiency of content production on the Web.

In response to the launch of Google’s Fast Flip, I observed that Google is correctly focused on creating a new user interface for news, when most media companies are not. A lot of people responded that Fast Flip is not an innovative or effective UI for news — which may be true, but that misses the point entirely.

It doesn’t matter so much whether Google succeeds or fails with this particular experiment. What matters is that they are trying to solve the right problem.

The challenge for media companies is not to figure out what to do with their content — content in and of itself doesn’t matter. It never has.

It’s all about the package.

Newspaper articles don’t matter without a newspaper. Magazine articles don’t matter without a magazine. TV shows don’t matter without a broadcast or cable channel.

Newspapers’ inability to generate the same revenue online as in print has nothing to do with content. It’s because on the web they are no longer in the business of packaging content, and that’s what the newspaper business, like every other media business, has always been about. Instead, media companies put their content on the web and let search and other aggregators package it.

An individual content item on the web, without a package, has marginal value approaching zero — and attempting to charge for an individual item of content is unlikely to change that. What you CAN charge for is the package.

Media companies need to be doing what Google is doing — experimenting with new ways to package content, which in a digital media world means new UIs and new ways to aggregate.

The nature of innovation is that many experiments will fail along the way. The key is to be aimed at solving the right problem.

Focus on the package. Whoever controls the package wins.

Ask newspapers. Or Google.

Oh, and while we’re on the subject of Fast Flip, lots of people overlooked one of the key words in the product name — FAST. Why does fast matter? How long does it take to get a result when you search on Google? Not long at all. In fact it’s darn FAST. (You can even see how long your Google search took in the blue bar across the top of the search results page.)

That’s why it matters — to the tune of $20 billion.  Here’s Marissa Mayer on the importance of being fast. Google has the most successful UI and content package in the history of the web, that created one of the most lucrative business models in the history of media, so don’t write them off too quickly.

Last month, four major newspaper companies announced a joint ad sales venture to “let national advertisers place ads on local Web sites with a single phone call.” When I read that, I realized suddenly why local newspapers are having so much trouble adapting to the web.

There’s no such thing as a local website.

Think about it for a minute.

There are websites that publish CONTENT pertaining to a particular locality — but a local WEBsite is an oxymoron, because all websites exist on the WORLD WIDE web, i.e. any website can be accessed (barring censorship) anywhere in the world.

A local newspaper, in contrast, is only distributed in a limited geographic region. Before the web, if a local newspaper reported a story of national significance, there were two ways for that story to get national distribution:

1. A wire service distributed and/or rewrote the story
2. A national news brand re-reported (and/or rewrote) the story

That was the solution to the problem of physical distribution — but now, local news content published on the web by a local news brand can be accessed anywhere in the world.

And yet it isn’t — because now the distribution problem isn’t a physical limitation, but instead a problem with ATTENTION. There is no way for that story to get attention on the web outside of the audience who already visits the local news brand’s website because they know the brand locally.

But what if there were a way for a local story on a local news brand’s website to get national attention?

And what if there were a way to do it without the help of Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, New York Times, or any other national brand?

Well, there is way…

A local news brand’s content could get national attention on the web if every other local news brand linked to it on their websites.

Huh?

Let me take a step back to explain. I’ve been writing a lot about link journalism, a way that journalists can enhance their original reporting and even create a new type of original editorial content by linking to other content on the web.

Because journalists don’t link to anything, they are completely disenfranchised from the web’s link driven distribution system.

But what if journalists did start to link… to each other.

Bloggers have been doing this for years, which is why some top bloggers have better distribution on the web than many journalists.

Ryan Sholin has a list of top blogs that journalists should emulate in their effort to become web-native reporters — most of Ryan’s suggestions are masters of link blogging.

Now imagine if 1,000 newspapers where actively link blogging about issues of local importance — and linking to each other’s reporting on the same issues as part of their link journalism effort.

For example, take the killings at Northern Illinois University, a tragedy of national interest. This event happened in Rockford Register Star’s backyard, and they reported the story from a unique local perspective.

Now imagine if local news brands around the country, as part of their coverage, linked to Rockford’s reporting — and to reporting by the Daily Chronicle in Dekalb, and reporting from other Illinois papers.

If enough newspaper sites around the country did this, the original reporting by these local news brands could have effectively gotten national distribution.

Here’s a less dramatic example. Let’s say you’re a local journalist assigned to report on concerns about local water quality. A simple search on Google news reveals local stories on water quality from across the country, fodder for a great link journalism piece to complement original reporting on how the issue presents in your locality.

But the result would be that your link journalism drives traffic to other local sites — put another way, your journalism would contributing to the national distribution of the reporting by those other local journalists, on the issue of water quality.

It’s national distribution, using a distributed model, i.e. distributing content across hundreds of localities adds up to national distribution. (Yeah, it takes a while to wrap your brain around that.)

But not only is it national distribution, it’s content targeted distribution — you’re directing people interested in a topic to other content on that topic.

This is just scratching the surface, but here’s the key — local newspapers need to reinvent their business model. And the current business model is failing because it’s based on a shrinking distribution model.

So how do you reinvent the business model?

First you need to reinvent the distribution model.

In the networked web era, influentials may not be people with a particularly connected temperament or Rolodex, or people who control and influence monopoly distribution channels (e.g. newspapers), but rather people who influence the network by leveraging the most powerful force on the web — the link. People like bloggers, top Diggers, del.icio.us power users, Facebook users who share lots of links, MySpace users who embed videos, Twitter users who post lots of URLs, or any social network user with links to lots of friends.

This idea jives with a provocative article in Fast Company about a new disruptive Duncan Watts theory. After last year debunking the “wisdom of the crowds” using the theory of cumulative advantage, Watts is back, this time debunking the idea that there is a class of “influentials” who is more likely than others to spread ideas, trends, product endorsements, or anything else that can be spread virally. The existence of unique classes of influencers was the premise behind Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point. But Watts, a Columbia professor doing work for Yahoo Research, says it’s all bunk.
The more Watts examined the theory of Influentials, the less sense it made to him. The problem, he explains over lunch in a Midtown restaurant, is that it’s incredibly vague. None of its proponents ever clearly explain how an Influential actually influences.

“It sort of sounds cool,” Watts says, tucking into his salad. “But it’s wonderfully persuasive only for as long as you don’t think about it.” For example, in The Influentials, Keller and Berry argue that trendsetters draw their social power from being active in their communities. Their peers naturally turn to them for advice. Need to buy a new car or navigate city hall? Everyone knows whom to trust. Gladwell, for his part, argues that trends spread like diseases; Influentials are the vectors who amplify and propagate the infection.

Fair enough, as a top-down view. But it’s murky, and for Watts, this is a critical flaw, because precision matters when you’re trying to explain highly social epidemics. Merely arguing that influence spreads like a disease isn’t enough, because, he says, diseases spread in very different ways. Some require multiple exposures; some don’t. Some reward “superspreaders,” and some don’t. (SARS broke out in Hong Kong not because the first victim was a superspreader but because a doctor mistakenly hooked him up to an aspirator–ventilating SARS-infected breath into the hospital air.)
This got me thinking about the dynamics of influence on the web, where in the age of Google PageRank, inline linking, and social applications, the link is the principal driver of “network efforts” and influence.

The reason Google’s search results often contain more blogs than traditional media content is that blogs were the first to harness the power of the link. Blogs linked to other blogs, while traditional media brands remained disconnected silos. Savvy web users — many college age or early 20s — pooled their links on Digg and developed the power to drive server-crashing volumes of traffic, forcing traditional media sites, who still lack such influence, to plaster themselves with Digg This buttons.

Embedding YouTube videos is a form of linking that allowed MySpace users and bloggers to drive the online video revolution. NYTimes.com users leverage the power of links in emailed articles to create a list of most emailed articles whose influence arguably rivals the NYTimes.com homepage.

One reason the emergent Twitter network is becoming so powerful is the widespread sharing of links. Twitter users are not influential because they have influential personalities, but because they are early tech adopters who are excel at figuring out how to use new web technologies to influence and create link-driven networks.

You can explain the power of social networks and the “social graphs” in terms of links — every Facebook profile has links to other Facebook profiles. Same with MySpace. And LINKEDin — get it?

Journalists and PR professionals, the influence brokers of traditional media, have lost a huge degree of influence on the web in large part because they don’t link to anything. While traditional media brands are still powerful channels on the web, they are losing influence everyday to the link-driven web network — journalists and PR professionals can no longer depend on controlling these former monopoly channels to exert influence online.

Whenever I give talks to traditional publishers who have been afraid to link to other sites because it will “send people away” instead of keeping them trapped in the publisher’s own content, my now standard response is to say that there’s a site that does nothing but link to other sites — all it does is send people away. And yet remarkably, people keep coming back. So much so, that this strategy has translated into $10 billion+ in advertising revenue. (Yes, Google of course.)

Anyone can become influential on the web simply by setting up a blog or an account on a social network or social bookmarking site and linking to people and content that interests them. Anyone who is influential offline and wants to retain that influence online needs to start linking — and to leverage those links in a large network.

Influence on the web is all about connectivity — the larger the network, the more powerful the links.

Until recently, the verb “syndication” was something big publishers and
agencies did. As a kid I recognized that “© King Features Syndicate” was the
one unfunny thing about Blondie or Dennis
the Menace. All it meant to me was some kind of Business was going on here.

Now, millions of individual writers syndicate their own works, usually
through RSS (Really Simple Syndication). Publishers and other large
organizations do too. This article is syndicated. So are updates to
product manuals, changes to development wikis, updates on SourceForge
and searches of keywords. You name it: if there’s something that updates
frequently on the Web, there’s a better chance every minute that the new
stuff is syndicated, if it isn’t already.

Far as I know, not many sources are making money with it. A lot, however,
are making money because of it. The syndicated world may not look like
an economy yet. But trust me, it is.

At this early stage in its long future history, syndication is primarily
a feature of blogging, which is primarily the product of too many people
to count. Blogging is not about large-scale things. It’s about human
beings who have no scale other than themselves. Only you can be good at
being you, and nobody else is the same as you. Syndication does more to
expand individual human potential than anything since the invention of
type. Or perhaps ever. The syndicated world economy is the one that
grows around unleashed personal powers of expression, productivity,
creation, distribution, instruction, influence, leadership–whatever.

In a loose sense, syndication is one side of conversation. Think about
conversation in the best sense of the word–the way people teach and
learn from each other, the way topics start and move along. Syndication
makes that happen in huge ways.

The notion that “markets are conversation”, popularized by The Cluetrain
Manifesto, was borrowed from the case I used to make for a form of
marketing that was far more natural and powerful than the formal kind:

1. Markets are conversation, and
2. Conversation is fire. Therefore,
3. Marketing is arson.

If you want to set fires, start conversations that tend to keep going.
Nothing does the latter better than syndication.

There are three reasons why we still don’t hear as much about
syndication as we should (and will). First, it’s still new. Second, it
didn’t come from The Big Guys. (It came from
Dave Winer, father of
RSS (Really
Simple Syndication). Third, it points toward a value system not grounded
only in exchange, one especially suited for the Net, a deeply ironic
worldwide environment where everybody is zero distance apart.

But let’s park the value system until later and talk about next week.
That’s when I’ll be in San Francisco for Syndicate. It’s the second in a
series of conferences by that name. The first was held in New York last
spring.

Since I’m the conference chair (disclosure: it’s a paying gig), and
since I’ll be giving both the introductory talk and the closing keynote,
Syndication is on the front burner of my mind’s stove.

Other subjects are there as well, some of which will be visited
in sessions at the show. Tagging, for example.
That’s a practice so new it’s not even close to having
standards of the sort we find at OASIS, the IETF and the W3C. Instead, it
has emerging standards, such as the ones we find at
microformats.org.

Like syndication, tagging is a long-tail activity, something individuals
do. Along with blogging and syndication, it helps outline a new branch
of the Net we’re starting to call the Live Web–as opposed to the
Static Web with “sites” that are “built” and tend not to change.

“The World
Live Web” is the title of my December Linux For Suits column in
Linux Journal. In it
I note the directory-less nature of everything on the Web that falls
in the UNIX file path east of the domain name. Every path to a document
(or whatever) is a piece of straw in the static Web’s haystack. Google
and Yahoo help us find needles in that haystack, but their amazing
success at search also tends to confirm the haystack nature of the
Static Web itself.

The Live Web is no less webby than the Static Web. They’re both part of
the same big thing. But the Live Web is new, and very different. It
cannot be understood in Static Web terms.

In that piece I also observed that blogs, as continuing projects by
human authors, leave chronological trails. These give the Live Web
something of a structure: a chronological one that goes
/year/month/day/date/post, even if that’s not the way each post’s URL is
composed. There is an implicit organizational structure here, and it’s
chronological.

Tagging, by which individuals can assign categorical tags of their own
to everything from links to bookmarks to photos, has given the Live Web
an ad hoc categorical structure as well.

So that’s what we’re starting to see emerge here: chronology and
category. Rudimentary, sure, but real. And significant.

But not organized. New practices and new ideas are coming along too fast.

For Xtreme evidence of that fact, follow Steve Gillmor around. For the
last year or so, Steve has been directing the attention of everybody he
can to the subject of, well, attention. His message, or one of them, is
that Attention Matters, and that it’s worth something, both to those
that have it and those who want some of it. There’s your
economy-in-waiting, right there.

For the legal community, the New York LegalTech show and conference has long been one of the preeminent opportunities to catch a glimpse of the future of legal technology. Sometimes, LegalTech has been spectacularly wrong in its “group think” predictions–I clearly recall the year that the exhibit hall was dominated by Lotus Notes-based solutions, most of which had completely disappeared within a year of their triumphant release. Most of the time, however, the conference provides a surprisingly accurate snapshot of litigation support, electronic discovery, and even the health of the legal industry as a whole. For this alone–and LegalTech offers much more–the show is a must-attend event for hundreds, if not thousands of legal professionals.

NY LegalTech has been criticized for years, however, for the “conference” side of the event. Though it offers dozens of educational presentations, a good number of which are CLE certified, the conference seems to have more than its fair share of sessions that never move beyond the most elementary discussion of their subject matter or are led by faculty who appear to be chosen for reasons other than their subject matter mastery and presentation skills. These presentations seem all the more jarring because the majority of conference attendees already have sophisticated knowledge of many session topics, and they attend these programs to increase their existing knowledge, not to be tutored in basics they have known for years.

LegalTech 2010 continued to have its share of weak presentations, but I was pleased to see that a number of conference sponsors took the conference’s persistent criticism to heart. Perhaps in keeping with the “back to work” ethos that permeated the entire conference, I found many more sessions than in the past that focused on practical examination of specific problems, rather than entry-level explanations of general issues. Even sessions featuring judges tended to discuss specific issues and their potential resolution, rather than the theoretical discourse that’s so common when judges must balance their ability to shape legal analysis against their need to appear impartial.

For me, though the educational sessions always offer some new information, I continue to get a greater education by visiting the exhibit hall and spending time with the vendors there. In wandering the aisles this year, for example, I could see not only the hundreds of specific solutions on display, but also industry reactions to the flood of e-discovery-related legal opinions that were issued in 2009. And, while LegalTech encourages all manner of practice support vendors to attend the show, the vast number of e-discovery solutions on display–overpowering the diverse mix of other exhibitors–also said a great deal about the current focus of the legal and legal technology industries.

So what are some of the more interesting things I picked up at LegalTech this year? Here are a few that come to mind.

1. Clients are getting even more serious about taking direct charge of e-discovery projects to save costs and to reduce business disruption. It was impossible to escape exhibitors who were offering enterprise-level data collection tools. Although representatives from each of these companies would still agree (if pressed) that using a competent third party professional or collection service remains the gold standard for neutral, unassailable data harvesting, the increasing frequency of pre-discovery meet and confer sessions to hammer out discovery protocols has made it possible for many litigants to negotiate less invasive and expensive data collection protocols. In addition, while litigants will always disagree to some extent about the appropriate procedures for discovery data collection, years of education within the legal community have somewhat reduced the knee-jerk skepticism with which self-collection is viewedDramatic growth in the number of enterprise data collection systems, with or without accompanying “early case assessment” analytical functionality, suggests that vendors are seeing corporate litigants invest ever more heavily in infrastructure that ostensibly reduces the costs of data collection and standardizes collection procedures across the organization’s entire litigation portfolio. Tools that automatically build audit information into each file acquisition add further reliability to ESI that has been collected by a self-collection tool, helping establish that these copies contain the full range of digital information that the originals possessed. I expect to see some of the less-well-funded or advertised tools wither away as the market matures, but I believe that we will continue to see continued growth in defensible self-collection solutions.
2. Hosted litigation support platforms continue to take market share from local-based litigation support software. Traditional litigation support software systems like Concordance and Summation continue to have a huge installed user base. However, it’s also clear that many legal teams are increasingly using outsourced, web-based repositories to host their discovery documents. Several basic reasons continue to drive this process.First, because many law firms still have insufficient in-house litigation support staff and resources to quickly respond to every legal team’s needs, outsourced hosting can offer faster access to discovery documents than loading the documents in-house. Second, it’s never been easier–or more expected–for lawyers to have access to their documents at any location and at any time. Web-based document repositories offer full access anywhere the legal team can find Internet access. Instead of laboriously copying the latest version databases onto laptop computers–or forcing users to attempt VPN connections over uncooperative hotel broadband networks–web-based repositories offer unlimited remote access without the security and configuration issues that arise when remotely connecting to law firm networks. Third, outsourcing a document repository relieves significant pressure on law firm network infrastructure. With multi-terabyte e-discovery projects becoming a common occurrence, it simply doesn’t make sense for law firms to continually invest in ever-larger amounts of network storage for their local networks. Increased network storage also carries significant costs that can’t necessarily be passed through to clients, such additional support staff and increased data redundancy / disaster recovery overhead.As an aside, I’ve found it interesting that few clients and law firms appear particularly concerned about the security of using web-based repositories to host confidential, even highly confidential, client documents. I certainly believe that the repositories themselves have relatively good protection against intruders, but lawyers pay surprisingly little attention to the other end of the digital pipe–the computers they use to access these systems. I’ve encountered more than a few lawyers sending e-mail messages or even reviewing documents in a Starbucks coffee shop. Public wifi hot spots are one of the least secure ways to access the Internet, and bad guys can use a number of electronic eavesdropping methods to capture exactly what information is being sent to and from a given computer. As a practical matter, the odds that this type of snooping will lead to the theft of sensitive client documents remains low, but that risk is still greater than zero. It will be interesting to see whether any litigant ever alleges that a document’s legal privilege status has been waived because the document was intercepted during its transmittal over a public network.
3. The phrase “Early Case Assessment” continues to be overused and under-defined. In 2009, “Early Case Assessment” (“ECA”) was one of the hottest buzz-words in the legal software industry. Suddenly, it seemed, everyone needed to have an “early assessment tool,” as though the concept of early evaluation of legal disputes was a revelation to lawyers (generations of whom had been doing this type of analysis, albeit with limited technological assistance, for decades, if not centuries). LegalTech 2010 continued this trend by exhibiting a broad range of early case assessment tools for quickly extracting intelligence from discovery documents. However, as with other popular jargon, the initial meaning of this phrase continues to be broadened and weakened.Today, it appears that some traditional litigation support software is being marketed as an early case assessment solution by simple virtue that the system provides the ability to run full-text searches against the database records loaded into it. Such marketing efforts are correct in that virtually any search tool can be used to identify documents, but these efforts also conveniently ignore the speed with which more sophisticated ECA systems can be deployed or the degree to which ECA tools try to streamline manual search so that the least amount of work possible is required to identify documents containing the most critical information. I haven’t gotten the impression that sophisticated litigants or lawyers are being fooled by these apples to oranges marketing claims, however, so it’s unclear whether this strategy will generate new sales.As confused as the ECA market may be at this time, it’s clear that litigants remain keenly interested in developing better valuation of a legal dispute early in the process. As ECA tools continue to mature, it will be interesting to see whether these tools are making a material difference in how litigation (and pre-litigation) matters are resolved. It will also be interesting to see whether law firms that aggressively market ECA to its clients will capture additional business. It doesn’t appear that litigants are choosing outside counsel based on the degree to which they are using electronic ECA tools, but in-house counsel are continuing to take a much closer look at ways that legal disputes can be resolved quickly and at the least expense.
4. Outsourced document review remains on the cusp of wide-spread adoption. Outsourced document review, whether conducted in the United States or offshore, continues to be a hot discussion topic. Notwithstanding the ABA’s opinion generally approving of properly supervised outsourced document review, I have heard some lawyers continue to question whether non-law firm document review services, some of which are marketing themselves as “soup to nuts” solutions for all aspects of discovery document reviews, are setting themselves up for unauthorized practice of law charges.A twist in this continuing debate, however, is that it’s unclear exactly how many legal teams are using outsourced review at all. For every case study that is published, hundreds of other legal teams consider and then reject the practice of turning over document review to a non-law firm service. Outsourced review would seem to be a logical continuation of the trend of engaging lower-cost “discovery counsel” to assist with first and second-level document review, but it’s still not typical case strategy for most litigants.LegalTech’s exhibit hall showcased a number of offshore document review services, each boasting of its secure review location and scalability to meet the needs of small and large document reviews. When pressed, however, many of these solutions providers admitted that outsourced review remains a “growing market”–meaning that they’re still not as busy as they’d like to be. As the legal market recovers from a generally weak 2009, it will be interesting to see the extent to which these services are used. It may well take until LegalTech 2011 to develop a good sense of whether outsourced review has moved into the mainstream–or whether it will remain on the cusp of general acceptance for yet another year.

Conclusion

In great contrast to last year, LegalTech New York 2010 offered an upbeat assessment of the legal market for the coming year. Increased investment in tools, combined with evidence of an upturn in the amount of legal work taking place, suggests that lawyers and legal technologists alike are finding themselves busier and more confident about the future of the legal marketplace. The products and services at the show–along with some of the advanced discussion of prominent e-discovery issues–also indicate the continuing sophistication of the legal community as it continues to address the legal problems caused–and solved–by technology.

Quick takes on the Web economy’s impact on the business world.

If you’re not on-line yet, you will be soon. That’s the finding of a recent study commissioned by Prodigy Biz Corp., which found that one-third of U.S. small businesses were on-line. The smallest organizations were the least likely to have taken the plunge. Only one in four companies with fewer than 10 employees reported that it had an Internet presence, while half of those with 10 or more employees were on-line already.

Nearly 75% of small companies reported that cost was not a barrier for getting onto the Web. The survey results ranked reasons for going on-line as follows: promoting to prospects (69%); doing E-commerce (57%); providing better customer service (48%); competing with other businesses (46%); and communicating with employees (11%).

Of course, few small businesses suggested that doing business on the Internet was easy. More than 40% of the small-business owners surveyed claimed that they did not have the staff or the time to maintain a Web site. And 66% didn’t believe that the Web offered them significant growth opportunities, because they are local businesses.

Such quibbling aside, many off-line small businesses planned to get on-line in the near future. Some 40% of businesses that didn’t have Web sites — approximately 2.1 million — said they would be on-line soon. The study was conducted by International Communications Research.

Four years ago Jayesh Patel, managing partner of the Los Angeles law firm Parker Mills & Patel, hung his firm’s shingle out on the Web. Although Patel intended to communicate to the firm’s base of big-ticket customers, the overwhelming response to the site has been from prison inmates, who write or call collect in search of a lawyer. “We don’t know what to do about it,” Patel says. “We can’t sort of boldly put on our Web page ‘Prison inmates, please don’t bother us.”

His misconception, he says, was expecting the Web audience to be much like his client base: professionals in management positions with a good income. “The audience is far, far bigger than we would have predicted.”

Jon “FatalError” Aguiar has traveled the globe playing in the world’s richest poker tournaments. In the last five years, he’s accumulated $1.1 million in winnings in live and online tournaments. Aguiar’s latest trip was to Monte Carlo for the European Poker Tour Grand Final.

PokerNews caught up with Aguiar to talk about two hands he played while in Monte Carlo, which both illustrate this week’s concept: relative hand strength.

Before we talk about these two hands, can you better explain what relative hand strength means?

Relative hand strength is the value of your hand versus your opponent’s potential range of hands, whereas absolute hand strength is just the value of your hand on the hand chart like a flush beats a straight. A lot of times, that doesn’t matter because of the way your opponent has played a hand up to that point, he can only have certain things.

Tournament: EPT Grand Final Main Event
Blinds: 50-100

An older online qualifier raised under-the-gun to 250. A middle-position player called, and I called on the button with king-queen. The big blind called too. The flop came queen-ten-four rainbow. It checked to me on the button and I bet 650. The big blind folded, the preflop raiser called, and the other player folded. The turn was a nine, which completes one of the straight draws and gives me a gutshot. He checked, and I check for pot control. The river comes a jack, and he checks pretty quickly again. I bet 1,425. He thinks and takes five 1,000 chips and gingerly places them into pot.

What are you thinking after he check raises this river?

I’m like, what the hell does he have here? He doesn’t have any bluffs. No online qualifier check-raise-bluffs on this river. It’s either a king, or ace-king. I basically figure I’m chopping 30 percent of the time and losing 70 percent of the time. Even though I have the second best straight, my relative hand strength is the worst possible hand against his range. I can only chop or lose. I showed him a king and folded. He looked pretty dejected and slid his cards into the muck.

Later on, I saw him play a hand where I check-called him on two streets after raising preflop with eights on a board of like ten-five-four-X. The river came a three and he just checked behind with a set of fives, so I’m pretty sure he wasn’t doing anything crazy with just a king in the other hand.

Can you sort of explain in more detail why you decided to check the turn for pot control?

I have a pretty good hand and a pretty good draw, but if I get check-raised, I have to fold. I just don’t see him check-calling many worse hands.

Hand #2
Tournament: $5,000 no-limit hold’em full-ring side event
Blinds: 150-300 with a 25 ante

The next hand was against a Finnish player or some sort of Scandinavian player who seemed to be competent. He raised under-the-gun plus one, got a caller, I called with king-queen suited on the button, and a bad player came along from the blinds. The flop came queen-seven-four rainbow. It checked to him and he made a standard continuation bet. The caller to my right folded and I called. We went to the turn heads-up.

The turn was a queen, giving me trips, but putting a flush draw on the board. We had like 1.7 times the pot left in our stacks, and I decided he’d be check-folding a ton of his range if I bet here. He checked and I checked, and unlike the other hand where I checked the turn for pot control, this was for deception and to get value.

The river was a jack, which completed the back-door flush draw. He wakes up and bets 9,000 into 11,500. In this spot, I should have been thinking about the fact that betting flop-checking turn and betting river is a very, very uncommon bluff line for people. They are either going to barrel all three streets, or bet-bet and check river. Just like the last hand, his range just doesn’t have much air in it at all. When you look at my relative hand strength, the only hands that I’m really beating at this point that make sense are like a really thin value bet from a hand like ace-jack that bet the flop, or a hand like queen-ten or queen-nine suited, but people aren’t always raising a hand like queen-nine suited or queen-then from under-the-gun eight-handed anyway. So, I made the call and he had pocket jacks. In this hand, I was like, “I have three-of-a-kind. I call,” but looking back at it, I really started berating myself for it. My hand really isn’t that good versus his range.

In hindsight, it seems like checking the turn was the perfect play against his hand.

Yeah, he’s check-folding the turn a substantially higher percentage of the time than he folds the river when it goes check-check on the turn and comes a blank on the river. There are only eight bad river cards that come for me versus jacks — the aces and kings, and only two cards in the deck that will lose me the pot. If I river quads, he pays off huge.

Understanding relative hand strength is one of the biggest problems amateurs have. When someone says, “They are just playing their cards,” is when players don’t think at all about relative hand strength and only consider their absolute hand strength. You get a lot of people, like at the Series, who are just face down in their whole cards and trying to catch and make certain hands instead of thinking what their opponents have and how wide or tight their opponent’s hand ranges are on any given or board, or any given river based on previous actions. That’s why it’s important to be able to put your opponent on a range of hands, and then evaluate the strength of your hand versus the strength of your opponent’s range.

Where should players start when trying to learn the difference between relative hand strength and absolute hand strength?

I think it’s important to be asking yourself questions throughout the hand like, “What type of hands would he be doing this with?” When your opponents are making bets and checks, ask yourself, “What does he want me to do when he does this?” or “What does the size of this bet mean?” Like when my opponent bet so big on the second hand, it was pretty obvious he was going for value. He probably would have been more like 60 or 70 percent of the pot with a weakish value hand. When he bet 80 to 90 percent of the pot, it looked like he wanted me to hero call the river and he wanted to get big value. Just think about what hands your opponents start with by what position he raises in and start eliminating hands after considering the actions.

Poker tournaments – especially large, multi-table events like those at the WSOP – are their own contained universe when it comes to poker strategy.

And they always create tricky hand scenarios very different from those you’ll find at cash games.

Rising blinds, fixed pay-out structures, a finite amount of chips, how much you can afford to lose. All of these can dramatically change the way you need to play any given hand.

A Common Scenario

You’re in a $1,500 No-Limit Hold’em WSOP event and have just been moved to a new table of 10 players.

You’re at the money bubble, with only a few players left to bust out before the remaining 500 players make it into the money.

Blinds: 10,000/20,000
Stacks:
UTG: 1,254,000
MP: 780,000
CO: 130,500
Hero (BTN): 620,000
SB: 430,600
BB: 1,890,100

Pre Flop: (Pot: 30,000) Hero is BTN with Q♥ Q♣.
One fold, MP raises to 60,000, CO folds, Hero re-raises to 180,000, 2 folds, MP re-raises all-in for 780,000.

Hero???

There are a lot of variables to consider here if we want to figure out what MP could possibly have.

He raised, then four-bet all in after you three-bet. This means:

• He has AA or KK
• He has JJ or a smaller pocket pair
• He has AK
• He thinks you’re trying to steal at the bubble and he is bluffing

These are all the options that make sense for this play. Let’s look at them in reverse order:

1) Bluffing

A lot of stealing goes on at the bubble, and that could be exactly what MP is trying to do with his original raise.

When you three-bet, he could be putting you on a re-steal, then making the four-bet thinking you won’t risk your tournament life on the bubble.

In fact, many players will fold KK or even AA in this spot, choosing to fold everything until the bubble bursts before risking his or her stack.

For this reason, MP could be making this move entirely to make you fold.

2) Ace-King

Given the action to this point there’s a decent chance he’s holding A-K.

Most players with A-K in this spot would like to end the hand here, without having to see a flop. There’s also a good chance you’d three-bet here with hands such as A-Q, almost any pair and maybe even A-J.

For this reason, it can be a decent bet for him to push on you. Even if you do have a hand like QQ, he’s got a coin-flip for the win if you call.

3) Pocket Jacks

If he has JJ or a smaller pocket pair, he could be making this move hoping you fold – but also content with a call, thinking he’s most likely in a coin-flip

Since he doesn’t have to risk his entire stack (just most of it), he won’t be completely out if he loses.

4) Pocket Aces and Kings

Finally, this is almost exactly how every player would play AA or KK.

Although he could try to trap, it makes more sense to take down the pot now and lower the amount of risk.

If you do call, he has a very strong hand and stands to win a big pot.

What’s Your Plan for the Tournament?

As you can see, all of these hand scenarios make perfect sense.  There really is no way to know what this player is doing without having any additional information.

But because this is your first hand at the table, you don’t have any additional information; you’re playing this with blinders on.

The only way you can decide what’s best to do here is to decide what your plans are for this tournament. Are you playing to cash, or are you playing to win?

Is the chance to double-up worth the risk of not cashing in the small money just past the bubble?

The real question: how much is the tournament buy-in worth to you? Most tournaments pay out just slightly more than the buy-in to the first few players after the bubble.

If you can afford to lose this money, and are only playing for a chance at the final table, then calling might be your best choice.

If you spent every last dime you have to get into this tournament, then you might want to consider folding, waiting to guarantee your buy-in back before you put everything across the line.

Some poker hands have no clear answer, and the only person who can tell you what the correct choice is, is you.

In an ideal world, you have a big enough bankroll and are always playing to win the tournament – and not needing to cash to eat.

In the real world though, sometimes limping into the money is the best thing you can do. This choice is up to you.

Once a backroom game only played by professional gamblers in the corners of Las Vegas casinos, poker has exploded into mainstream culture. Poker has made it’s way into homes around the world as people watch major tournaments on their televisions and play at online poker rooms on their computers.

The largest live poker tournament in history was in 2006 when the WSOP Main Event reached 8,773 players, sending eventual winner Jamie Gold home with a first-place prize of $12 million.

Winning a tournament of that size certainly takes a ton of luck but that doesn’t mean tournament poker isn’t a skill game. The best players have an edge over the rest of the field and, over time, will win more than their less-skilled peers.

But it’s the element of luck that makes tournament poker so attractive. Anyone with a chip and a chair has the chance to beat the best in the world, and come home a millionaire.

What is a Poker Tournament?

Unlike a cash game which can run indefinitely, a poker tournament begins at a predetermined start time with each player buying a ticket to the event, and starting at the same time with the same number of chips.

Players play until they are eliminated by losing all of their chips. A set number of finishers (typically around 10% of the total starting field) get paid on a descending scale from the winner down to the last paid finishing spot.

All players who finish below the lowest paid spot (for example in a 100 person tournament, all players finishing from 100^th to 11^th) leave the tournament with nothing but a story.

Differences between Tournaments and Ring Games

Aside from being able to re-buy and cash-out whenever you like, tournament play sees the blinds increase on a predetermined schedule. This is very different from the static blinds of a ring game which will allow players to dictate their own pace of play.

Another major difference between cash games and tournaments are the stack sizes. The stack sizes in a cash game are typically closer to each other than in a tournament, where some players will have many times that of the average stack, while others may just hold a single chip.

A successful tournament player needs to understand how to play with all stack sizes, while a cash game player can choose to only ever sit behind a stack of a specific amount.

Stack Sizes

How you play in a tournament will mostly depend on two variables: the stage of the tournament and the size of your stack.

The size of your stack is measured in two ways:

1. Your stack in comparison to the average stack size
2. Your stack in relation to the blinds.

The more chips you have, the more risk you’re able to shoulder. In other words, you can make plays which risk 5,000 chips if you have 50,000, but the same play would be foolish if you only hold 6,000.

The most important thing to understand in a tournament is your chips are your tournament life.

Chips = Life

When you run out of chips, your tournament is over; everything you do in a tournament should be based on this one concept. Protect your chips like they’re your children, all the while trying to grow your family.

Stages of a Tournament

There are three basic tournament stages:

• Early
• Middle
• Late

Early Stage

Since everyone gets to play the early stages of almost every tournament this is the part in which all players have the most experience, feel the most comfortable, and have a lot of chips in relation to the blinds. Everyone’s on an equal footing and it’s hard to find anyone looking to gamble.

People in this stage are rarely looking to get it all in with anything but the nuts. If you find a player willing to play a large pot, they either have the nuts, they’re looking to gamble or they’re trying to build a big stack early through sheer aggression. More often than not, though, they have the goods.

The standard approach to playing in this stage is to play very ABC tight-aggressive poker. It makes no sense to make big moves to steal the blinds, since the blinds are worth relatively nothing compared to the size of your stack.

The idea is to make it through the early stage with average or above chips, giving you room to maneuver as you enter the middle stage.

Middle Stage

The middle stage will range from being deep-stacked at the start (lots of chips compared to blinds) to short-stacked near the end. In this stage chips are quickly becoming more valuable, each round of blinds potentially bringing you one step closer to elimination.

It’s at this point you can no longer afford to sit around waiting for only the best hands. You need to steal blinds and protect your chips to keep yourself from getting short. Once you get too short your only move left is all in.

As Dan Harrington wrote in his famous Harrington on Hold’em tournament strategy books it’s always better to take a risk to keep yourself sitting with a healthy stack than to wait until you’ve been whittled down, forced to take a risk just to stay alive.

If you take the risk to stay healthy and lose, you still have a handful of chips to try again with. If you wait until you’re in dire straits you have no second chance.

The goal with the middle stage is simply to stay alive and get yourself into the money (a tournament pro cares little about making the money, and plays to win at all times). Once you’re into the money, you’ve entered the late stages of the tourney.

Late Stage

The late stage will have many players with very few chips, and a few players with a lot of them. This is the time of a tournament when everyone’s willing to gamble. Once you’re in the money, people no longer care about going bust and are aiming for the win at all times.

You need to play very aggressively, make few or no mistakes, and get lucky at the right times to have a shot at the title. Luck is always a part of poker, and in tournaments it becomes a large factor of the game in the later stages.

With the blinds being very large, and many stacks being very short, most players will be playing a simple all-in or fold game. You need to be willing to take coin flips, and have the luck to win them if you want to finish in first.

How to Become a Better Tournament Player

Firstly, read every article, book, forum thread and webpage you can find. Watch poker on TV, listen to webcasts, and watch strategy videos. But above all else, you’re going to have to play as much poker as you can.

The more tournaments you play, the better you will become at playing them. Many of the best tournament players in the world play hundreds to thousands of tournaments each year. The more you play, the better you will get.