I'd usually heard nothing but scorn for these tournaments. "Shove-fests" or "donkaments" with no opportunity for post-flop play or bluffing because everybody is effectively short-stacked.
Miller poses the following question:
You’re playing a series of 6-handed winner-takes-all no-limit tournaments. The blinds start at $50-$100, and all your opponents start with $10,000 in chips each time. They all play fairly well, but none of them is a real standout. You play fairly well too, perhaps a bit better than them. You’ve been boning up on your short stack strategies lately, so you can be counted on to play fairly well with stacks of all sizes. The tournament structure is slow and doesn’t include antes at any level.
Which of these scenarios would be worth the most money to you?One entry into this tournament series with a starting stack of $10,000 Five entries into this tournament series with starting stacks of $2,000 each time Twenty entries into this tournament series with starting stacks of $500 each time One hundred entries into this tournament series with starting stacks of $100 each time
The answer, according to him and many of the respondents, is 100 entries of $100. Because short-stacks have an advantage, high blinds actually give an advantage to short-stacked players since they can get in quickly and cannot be bluffed or check-raised out of a pot.
Although turbos aren't quite analogous - everyone is short-stacked, not just you, so you lose that advantage - they can offer some great opportunities to perfect short-stack play.
The dirty secret is that turbos are kind of fun and much less of a grind than MTTs and cash games. If you hate getting all-in with KJs and A9o (and I do), you have to make some adjustments in turbos, but they can be pretty profitable.
I'm not sure if a different/worse caliber of players is attracted to turbos, but it certainly seems possible given the limited skill set required.
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