Here's one way to look at it: A turbo tourney is just like a regular tournament-if we can just imagine that this regular tournament is hyperactive, on speed, and has drunk about three pots of very strong coffee. In a turbo, blinds increase very rapidly, usually every five minutes, though sometimes they'll go up as quickly as every three minutes. From this one difference the entire texture of the tournament alters dramatically.
Everything about the event is handled in such a way to move things along quickly, and the end result is that a turbo event will be finished in about 50-75 percent of the time that it would take to play a regular tournament. Turbos come in all shapes and sizes-multi-table events, sit-n-goes, and satellites. Because of their increased speed, turbos are more action-filled and exciting than ordinary tournaments, and thus have become extremely popular. But this extra excitement comes at a price.
Strategy-wise, a turbo event is fundamentally different from a regular tourney in a number of ways. First, your starting standards must be lowered. If you only play premium starting hands, you'll quickly get blinded down to a small stack, with all the handicaps that accompany smallstack play. Second, good preflop play is paramount. The speedy format favors a hyper-aggressive style-especially for those players who love to push all in before the flop. So there will be less opportunity for you to out-play your opponents after the flop.
To avoid being eaten by the blinds, you'll need to start building up your stack ASAP. That means pushing every single edge you can find right from the get-go, no matter how small it may be. It means playing more marginal cards, because the blind structure just won't allow you to wait for something better. It means you have to take more risks. It means bluffing won't succeed as often as it will in a regular tourney, because opponents are more likely to call down you with borderline hands. It means a patient, tight, conservative strategy will almost certainly fail. In short, it means you'll need to gamble more if you want to win.
Turbos have a significantly higher luck factor than regular tournaments. That's just the nature of the beast. With so many preflop all-in confrontations, victory is frequently a simple matter of who catches the better cards. Who gets lucky, and who does not. Turbos may be more exciting to play, but the poker skills you have worked so hard to develop will matter less when you're playing them. Which is not to say that skill doesn't matter at all in a turbo. Of course it does. At best, any poker tournament contains a tremendous element of luck, and even the most skilled player in the world cannot win a big multi-table event without a measure of good fortune. The turbo format just makes pure dumb luck a more powerful factor than it already was.
But on the flip side, because turbos take much less time to finish, you can actually play more tournaments within the same space of time. For as long as it would take you to complete two normal tourneys, you could play in three, maybe even four turbos. Pro players argue that this ability to compete in more events within the same time-frame is a big advantage for the skilled player, and it compensates for the fact that a turbo's quick blind structure increases the importance of luck. Turbos favor quick-thinkers. They favor decisive players who excel at preflop play. But most of all they favor aggressive players who know how to push small edges and who aren't afraid of risk.
