Day 15 - 6max MTT DOLTS
Ok, so this will be a little bit of a rant at MTT players and then hopefully some justification at the end.
I've watched a bunch of interviews of players in the WSOP, perhaps every English speaking WSOP interview over the last 3 years! One thing I've heard over 20 times is "6max is my favourite type of tournament" "Im the best at 6max tournaments" "6max tournaments is where I excel.
Link to one I just watched:
So later in the interview we get the "oh yeah im awesome at 6max line"
Which could definitely be true, maybe she plays a lot of 6max cash games and understands things, but from my reckoning shes an MTT pro, or player, whatever.
So the first misconception is that they think they are better.
1a - I am better at 6max tournaments
This is generally because 1) Theres less people so you naturally win a higher % of pots, your cut off and button get more walks so you can steal and cbet and sometimes double barrel and win, for full ring grinders they start thinking, wow Im super good at 6max I win so many pots and completely run over the table.
It is also because 6max is higher variance thus more chance of building a stack or busting. Dynamics naturally grow quicker, because you get more walks to your button you steal more and thus your opponent starts to get a sample size on you a lot quicker and ca adjust quicker and thus the dynamic increase.
Example.
Full ring tournament, you get a walk on your button once out of every 10 times, 6max you get your button once out of every 3 times. So it takes 18 orbits for you to have stolen the blinds 5 times rather than 100 orbits like in full ring. So the sb plays back after the third or 4th time and naturally tens vs aq becomes a monster and thus there is higher variance and more times dolts have managed to accumulate chip stacks and then when selling for a 6max tournament in the future they naturally assume they are HUGE value at 1.2, I mean this one time i won 4 high variance flips and stole the blinds and cbet a bunch, I must be amazing value amirite?
2- Totally disjointed, terrible wide ranges.People usually expect, oh this kid is a online cash game player he is going to be carazzzzyyyy, when in reality it is the MTT players who completely over adjust. I would imagine the online cash game players use a range something similar to (I designed this)

Now I am SURE that these MTT guys are opening significantly wider than this from UTG, I know for a fact that they completely over adjust and think raising Q2dd utg is going to be fine, when in reality vs good players its going to be a disaster and they gonna get mauled.
Not understanding position or pot controlThis is one of the reasons that raising wider UTG may not be that bad. These guys think that because its 6max you HAVE to 3bet and peeling is wrong. This is so innacurate. For example cut off opens and we're on the button we should do something similar to:

Yellow is call, red is 3bet/broke, blue is 3b/fold.
But these guys are going apeshit and 3betting hands which are just slam dunk calls.
Lets just think from a theory perspective, if a guy is opening hands as weak as Q2, how is the best way to exploit this?
1) 3bet hands like KQ, QJ, QTs that absolutely dominate his range and pot control while we are in position and can extract so much value later
2) Actually let him get away with opening so wide and trying to punish him with immediate profit and risk him getting batshit and 4betting q2 (which often they do as well) rather than trying to seek maximum ev from the hand.
There are lots of other ways where cash games players have a huge edge over these guys and it really infuriates me to seeing them all say how good they are without understanding the basics behind 6max and would be fairly confident that with their style they wouldnt beat nl10 online.
#justclickingbuttons #winningraces #lolvariance #dolts
I strive to play as much 6max tournaments in Vegas, the Venetian has 2 $1600 20k stack 1 hour blind levels and there is a $2.5k 4max WSOP event which I think will look tougher on paper than it actually is.
Dont get me wrong, lots of these guys will be awesome at poker and will adjust really well, Brammer for example is a boss at 6max tournaments.
For further delusion about how people think:
Pretty annoying, how deluded these guys can be and probably have made a lot of money from Full Tilt from sponsorship.
3 more sleep.