The nature of wagering

I've thought a lot about the nature of wagering over the nearly 9 years that I've played online poker, and recently realized that wagering is at the core of the difference between cash games and tournaments. Simply stated, tournaments involve pure wagers and cash games do not. What do I mean by a pure wager? An amount of money that is immediately and irrevocably spent. When you enter a tournament, your buy in and your entry fee are pure wagers. If you end up making the money, that's very nice, but it doesn't change the fact that the buy in and entry fee were immediately and irrevocably spent. That is not, and can never be, the case in a cash game. Whenever you make a bet in a cash game, you don't know until the hand is over whether that bet actually caused money to be deducted from your balance. It's a provisional bet, not a pure one. Perhaps that explains why I hate cash games so much :-) This emotion no longer smacks of ingratitude, since my tournament earnings now surpass my cash game earnings.

style flavor buy_in entry players hands entries paid place winnings

MTT-R NLHE    43500  6500       9    63      77   18    29        0
MTT-R NLHE    43500  6500       9   104      69   15    12   368000

delta: $68,000
MTT with rebuys NLHE balance: $12,086,000
2017 balance: $13,044,225
balance: $24,462,055