MTTs are my bread and butter [UPDATED - see page 3]

[AndrewT]

Excellent advice from Mantis.

Yeah I agree (for once lol), though complete disimissing learning cash is a bit too much  for my liking and you can retain skills in both.

There is actually an argument which is that if you play cash for income, then you should stay away from tournaments altogether as you'll spend too much time playing in short-stacked environments which will make you pick up bad habits which will cost you when you play deepstack cash.

[Longy]

Excellent advice from Mantis.

Yeah I agree (for once lol), though complete disimissing learning cash is a bit too much  for my liking and you can retain skills in both.

There is actually an argument which is that if you play cash for income, then you should stay away from tournaments altogether as you'll spend too much time playing in short-stacked environments which will make you pick up bad habits which will cost you when you play deepstack cash.

Agreed but im sure there are examples of players who excell in both Phil Ivey for one, mind you I tend to not mix the two.

[MANTIS01]

Well of course I was well aware that the "don't play cash comment" was the stirrer there.

If your main income is poker and you want to make money, then playing cash is a mandatory requirement imo. However, the fine difference between winning and loosing tournaments can often be the mentality you employ....and I think the mentality you need to succeed in cash and tournaments is different. If you can successfully switch between the two completely then God speed to you but it's often the case that if you do something lots it becomes habitual.

Phil Helmuth is the most successful modern day tournament player but is always seen as the "value" in cash. The skills he has work best in tournaments. So if the question is "How do I do better in tournaments?" then I don't think the answer can be found in cash. But if the question is "How do I make money playing poker?" then the don't play cash comment would be an idiotic one for sure.

[boldie]

I like Mantis' advice..it's good positive advice. I don't like the "don't play cash" part though. She said she's playing for profit..it's her living and therefore cash is an essential addition.

I have to say I don't like the "I don't play online tourneys, they don't work for me" part of the original post. Making a living out of playing live tourneys is just about the most ineffective way of trying to be a successful MTT player because of the expenses involved. I understand that there is a big difference between playing live tourneys and online tourneys but it is something I think you have to work on, not doing that would be a big mistake in my humble opinion.

[Claw75]

Hi Danni,

not sure I can offer any great advice, but just wondered if you'd been able to put your finger on any factors affecting your results.  Do you think you are not playing as well, or are you getting unlucky?  IMVHO it sounds like you had a good run, and that's being balanced out by a not so good run.  Try not to let the bad results get to you, and remember that you are a good tournament player, and it's the long term results that matter.

[bobby1]

If your main income is poker you should imho play cash games not tourneys. Online cash games are available 24/7 and a decent player can make money with good selection and having a this is business mindset. When I left work I was doing a job that paid 35k a year, one day I sat down and worked out how much after tax, expenses,travel, sustenance and suits a year and it equated to about £60 a day. I decided that I could make this amount consistently each day from punting and pokering with a nice bankroll and a 'smallball' mindset IF I cut out poker tournaments.


Its not that I haven't played well/won tourneys in the past its that the sheer difficulty of winning a decent runner event means  you have to get good returns now and again to cover the variance. For me playing tourneys is gambling to make a wage more than playing cash.By sticking to cash games you are playing for smaller more regular profits, this keeps you in the business mindset from day to day slowly building up a wage.

Now I am aware that my mindset is maybe smallball but its to avoid the situation you are in that I prefer to play that way. The game is full of players that are good at poker but try to crack the higher buy in tourney schedule and go skint doing it, this is not a business like way to play for a living imho.

As Andrew say above I have deffo found that my tourney game has suffered a lot from playing constant cash but so be it, when I do play a tourney its usually live and a break from the norm tho still very important as a potential bankroll booster.

I've nothing but respect for players like Tom that make a good living playing online comps and some of the bigger live games but he has fantastic bankroll management and I'm pretty sure doesn't put himself in danger of going bust. In truth my game isn't good enough to compete at a level like that but I dont mind that at all coz I have found a level I win at consistently. 

Tourneys for show, cash games for dough Is how I like to think of it.


Do you play cash games online Lady? If so have you played a lot of hands to give you a fair sign of how much you could make a month by sticking to them?

What kind of buyin tourneys are you entering?

[Royal Flush]

If your main income is poker and you want to make money, then playing cash is a mandatory requirement imo.

Why?

Royal Flush - I hate playing online and it doesn't work for me at all unfortunetly.  I play poker live for maybe 7 hours a day, 5 days a week altogether, but this is a mixture of STTs, MTTs, and cash.  At the moment I am profiting in cash games and STTs, its just the MTTs that are putting a bit of a drain on.  The card room guys at Gala worked out that in the last six months I have paid about £1000 in juice, its probably a bit more now, which means i have staked over £10,000 in there on STTs and MTTs.   I know the variance shows more in live play because you see so few hands compared to online, but I'd rather see what I can do to help it rather than just putting it down to variance alone.  I am definitely very much in profit for the year just gone, but it has been gradually dwindling for the last few months, which is what I need to fix.

Quite simply put your sample size is just tiny, there is no way of working out yet if you are a winning player or a losing player. The only way to make a living from tournament poker is to play online, its the only way to ride out the variance.

What about it don't you like? If you could work yourself into becoming a long term winning MTT player online then you are laughing.

[byronkincaid]

it seems like I look at poker in a fundamentally different way to you guys. To me it's all NL HE, you get two cards and they put 5 in the middle. If I have 100 BBs I play pretty much the same whether I'm playing cash or a comp. If I decided I wanted to play cash with 10 or 20 BBs then I would play pretty much the same as I would in a comp. There are some other things to consider in a tourny, blinds going up, the bubble, going up the pay ladder but they are fairly simple things to consider aren't they?

so where am I going wrong? what are these huge differences that I am missing? why will playing cash ruin my tourney game when I think it's the total opposite?

the reason I started thinking about playing cash is that I donked my way into the season 2 Monte Carlo EPT where IIRC we started with 200 BBs. I absolutely was a fish out of water, errr yeah I'll call with , er implied odds, er I've missed, er I'll raise the turn and hopefully he'll fold, oh he's called and the rivers missed me, what do I do now

If I ever win a sat to a big event again I will be a lot more confident when deep and when short it's just the standard 20 BB tourney game we've all played a zillion times right? 

[ifm]

I know plenty of players who purely play £10/£20 rebuys locally (walsall, broadway, starcity etc.) that year after year make a constant profit.
You must know these too Mark.
When you get chance ask Vince Madden about his poker book.

[vegaslover]

it seems like I look at poker in a fundamentally different way to you guys. To me it's all NL HE, you get two cards and they put 5 in the middle. If I have 100 BBs I play pretty much the same whether I'm playing cash or a comp. If I decided I wanted to play cash with 10 or 20 BBs then I would play pretty much the same as I would in a comp. There are some other things to consider in a tourny, blinds going up, the bubble, going up the pay ladder but they are fairly simple things to consider aren't they?

so where am I going wrong? what are these huge differences that I am missing? why will playing cash ruin my tourney game when I think it's the total opposite?

the reason I started thinking about playing cash is that I donked my way into the season 2 Monte Carlo EPT where IIRC we started with 200 BBs. I absolutely was a fish out of water, errr yeah I'll call with , er implied odds, er I've missed, er I'll raise the turn and hopefully he'll fold, oh he's called and the rivers missed me, what do I do now

If I ever win a sat to a big event again I will be a lot more confident when deep and when short it's just the standard 20 BB tourney game we've all played a zillion times right? 

Basically put tourneys require a change in gears, moves etc as the blinds become larger. In cash they stay the same and is more odds focused. You should always be playing a hand as a slight fav in cash as you can just pull up again, not so in a tourney, where losing a race can mean your out.

In answer to Op it sounds as though you have the answers already. Players were giving you more respect and passing hands but they are not anymore. This has reduced your edge. They sound like crapshoots against opposition that isn't that tough. I find that varience becomes more a part in these circumstances as people wont let go of hands. Sounds stupid but play a few micro limit tourneys online, these crapshoot live tourneys aren't played much different imho. It may even be worth just sticking to stt and cash live for a while, as your making a profit at them.
Also as you earn a living from poker then you probably have to start playing online. The expenses are much lower, plus you would be earning cashback from the juice.

[MANTIS01]

Yes Ian, I know Vince well, and he is indeed a seasoned campaigner and a solid player. But he also knows a lot about the bad runs too. I talked to him during a period when he hadn't cashed for weeks and he was well pissed off...so he's aware that constant profit is difficult to sustain. He always has a punt at the bigger events though. Like Marcus, he knows that winning an event like the Grand Prix buys you a lot of future poker.

Also, Vince is over 100 years old so you can't acquire his skills overnight.

[bobby1]

it seems like I look at poker in a fundamentally different way to you guys. To me it's all NL HE, you get two cards and they put 5 in the middle. If I have 100 BBs I play pretty much the same whether I'm playing cash or a comp. If I decided I wanted to play cash with 10 or 20 BBs then I would play pretty much the same as I would in a comp. There are some other things to consider in a tourny, blinds going up, the bubble, going up the pay ladder but they are fairly simple things to consider aren't they?

so where am I going wrong? what are these huge differences that I am missing? why will playing cash ruin my tourney game when I think it's the total opposite?

the reason I started thinking about playing cash is that I donked my way into the season 2 Monte Carlo EPT where IIRC we started with 200 BBs. I absolutely was a fish out of water, errr yeah I'll call with , er implied odds, er I've missed, er I'll raise the turn and hopefully he'll fold, oh he's called and the rivers missed me, what do I do now

If I ever win a sat to a big event again I will be a lot more confident when deep and when short it's just the standard 20 BB tourney game we've all played a zillion times right? 

Playing cash only I feel I have lost a little understanding of the nuances of tourney poker that I had before. I bluff less, poistion raise less and generally just play the cards instead of looking for spots I can exploit. In cash games I like to have certain criteria met when I sit at a table, these conditions are unatainable in tourneys.

[PocketLady]

Hi Danni,

not sure I can offer any great advice, but just wondered if you'd been able to put your finger on any factors affecting your results.  Do you think you are not playing as well, or are you getting unlucky?  IMVHO it sounds like you had a good run, and that's being balanced out by a not so good run.  Try not to let the bad results get to you, and remember that you are a good tournament player, and it's the long term results that matter.

Hi Claire, yes it was a very good run indeed and I'm aware that things aren't going to be like that very often, but I don't feel that this bad swing in tournaments is just down to variance.  The main problem I think is the venue.  The structures just don't allow the good players enough of an edge.  But I worry that this is not the only reason, and that my game has been altered for the worst by playing against bad players all the time, or that I'm playing too much so I'm not always playing to the best of my ability or something.  As far as the cards go, I'm not getting particularly bad ones at the moment (although its not wonderful either), although if I find myself in a coinflip situation I pretty much always lose at the moment, which doesn't help.  Thanks for the advice though, hopefully things will turn round a bit soon.  New Year and all that.

As far as cash play effecting tournament play and vice-versa, I tend to try and keep both styles of play very seperate, especially in tournaments with very restrictive blinds.  I do worry though, like I've said before, that because the standard of play is not very good at Gala, that sometimes I get sucked into playing much looser than normal because I want to play them at their own game, see more flops, and try and outplay them.  And this quite often backfires.

[bobby1]

Mantis wrote

3. STT's are good for tournament practise and can often be a source of regular income but I wouldn't rely on these myself. Why? Because the variance is such when playing tournament poker that you NEED bigger cashes in MTT's in order to sustain yourself through these bleak periods. In addition, we play tournament poker to WIN big tournaments and nothing is ever going to beat that. It is the ultimate destination on your poker journey. Even just using a % of your current STT profit to tackle sats for bigger events is the way to go. You are better with big stacks so avoiding big stack events is not a good move for you. One big cash will blow this current negativity away in a heartbeat.

Mantis, I disagree with this and I know I may be standing alone. The ultimate destination of anyone that is seriously playing poker is to make money, why do people always think it is entering and winning poker tourneys?

If the player is winning cash at STT's and losing at MTT's why would anyone stop playing the winning comps and start to take shots at bigger events, they are trying to make a living not get blinded by the flashing lights.

In my experience STT playing is a pretty low risk play, a little monotonous but so are most jobs, my advice if you dont want to play cash would be to knock the MTT's on the head and play where you are making a profit in the STT's.

thanks

[Moskvich]

What strikes me in the OP is, as Flushy says, how little you've actually played in six months, despite putting the hours in.

I have basically no feel at all for what is an achievable return on investment in live MTTs and STTs. And obviously I don't know what your living costs are, PLady. But if poker is your sole income and you want to build your bankroll as well, then if you're 'investing' £10k in six months I guess you'd need something like a 100% ROI. Is this realistic...?

If you played online then a 10% ROI would probably be realistic for STTs at the same stakes - but you'd easily be able to see 10 times as many hands per hour, so could 'invest' £100k in six months and make the same amount of profit.

It seems to me that there's a major psychological disadvantage here to playing live as opposed to online. Online, it's fairly quick and easy to work out what your average ROI is. That means that when you play solidly but have a losing week, you can still tell yourself, "Well, I put in 30 hours and on average I make $30 an hour, so in theory I'm up $900." (As long as you scale down your big winning sessions to their 'theoretical' level as well.)

But live, because it's so much harder to work out whether and by how much you are actually a long-term winning player, a losing spell can much more easily make you think that you're throwing money away, and affect your game/motivation.

Good luck.

(If anyone can say what's an achievable ROI in MTTs live and online I'd be really interested, thanks.)