Just a few short years ago the vast majority of poker players spent their days and hours in cash games. While tournament specialists were always around, tournaments didn’t occur frequently enough to allow players to earn a living specializing in them. Even the upper echelon of tournament players had to beat cash games too, in order to make a living at the poker table.

This, of course, was back in poker’s Pleistocene age, before the lipstick camera and the World Poker Tour made poker a spectator sport and poker in cyberspace was not yet the next big thing. Television brought tournament poker to the masses, and tournaments provided a gleeful winner at the end of each episode. If not for tournaments, poker would have to be sold to audiences as a series of formless cash games without a beginning or an end. Lack of a story line that can unfold, play out and wrap up in an hour’s time usually doesn’t make for very good television, and tournament poker and television proved to be made for each other. Tournaments provided the viewing audience with winners and losers, heroes and villains, and all the drama that centers around who is going to draw out on whom — and when.

When the entire world heard how Chris Moneymaker won the World Series of Poker in 2004 by garnering his buy-in a $40 satellite, a similar desire was created in almost every new poker player. Like modern day Rumplestiltskins seeking to spin straw into gold, many recent poker adherents are hoping to win their way in to the World Series of Poker’s $10,000 buy-in no-limit hold’em tournament for forty or fifty dollars and parlay it into a multi-million dollar payday too.

There’s a lot to be said for tournament poker. It offers incredibly large prize pools for relatively moderate investments, and even small, affordable events offer a nice payday for those skilled and fortunate enough to wind up on the first few rungs of the pay ladder.

Tournaments are also a terrific way to learn a new game. Rather than buying in, losing, and then buying in again, a tournament provides a lot of play for a fixed buy-in. They also offer an easy and inexpensive way to learn a new game or build needed skills for your favorite form of poker without having to worry about mounting losses. And last but not least, it can be thrilling as well as personally satisfying to play in a tournament and knock out a name player. But if you play low limit cash games while your poker hero plays $100-$200 limit games, you’ll never get that opportunity unless it occurs during a tournament.

If you’re fortunate enough to win a small buy-in satellite, you can even find yourself playing a large buy-in tournament on money you won, and as we all know, money won is twice as sweet as money earned.

Tournaments offer glamour and glitz along with potentially big pay days, but since poker is a zero sum game — for every dollar won someone else loses a buck — those big tournament wins you read about are offset by lots of losses. And when you get down to cases, the easiest way to make money playing poker is not by winning the occasional tournament. No indeed; it comes from beating the cash games day in and day out. Playing cash games may not be a glamorous, but there’s a lot less variance in your bankroll.

After all, just one bad beat or miracle hand made by a lucky opponent can knock you out of a tournament, whereas a hand lost is just a hand lost in a cash game. It’s nothing more, nothing less, and you can recover from a lost hand and continue to beat the cash games. If you’re eliminated from a tournament, your day is over.

Cash games, particularly fixed-limit cash games, are based on exploiting small edges over and over and over again. You don’t have to get especially lucky to beat a cash game either. While a spate of good luck always helps, if you play good, solid poker — it needn’t be world class poker, either; just a better game than your opponents — and keep exploiting those small edges, your winnings will soon reflect the difference in skill between your play and that of your opponents.

A tournament player can go for a year or so and not win a thing, even if that player is among the very best in the world. The variance inherent in tournament poker is astonishingly high. It’s higher than many of us can imagine, and certainly higher than most of us would like to admit. That high variance goes a long way toward explaining why so many tournament players are out of funds for long stretches of time and many of them rely on being staked by others in order to continue competing on the tournament circuit.

While I enjoy tournament poker — it’s a different game entirely with different strategies required to succeed — for day to day poker success, there’s nothing like a cash game. They are always available online and at brick and mortar casinos, and you can find games at every limit. Playing cash game poker offers a quicker correlation between skill and results.

One major benefit of cash games is the reduced volatility. If you are better than your opponents, you’ll know it with some degree of certainty in less time than you would if you were playing tournaments exclusively. Tournament play is like a band releasing a new CD or a writer coming out with a book. Regardless of how good the book or CD is, there’s no guarantee of it becoming a best seller or top-of-the charts album.

If you are better than your cash game adversaries, you will beat them in the long run. As long as it might take to reach that ephemeral point where your results match-up with whatever edge you hold over your adversaries, it takes much, much longer in tournament play. In addition, cash game players are free to promote themselves to bigger games whenever they believe they have the requisite skills and bankroll to beat the opposition at the next level.

Cash games also fit the lifestyle of those time-strapped people among us who might be able to fit a half-hour or even an hour of online poker into their busy lifestyles before dinner or after the baby goes to bed, but not the large blocks of free time required to play in a tournament.

A lot of luck goes into tournament results, and while I enjoy them, if I absolutely had to choose one or the other, I’d prefer to stick with cash games.