Many poker players have the desire to be MTT or multi-table tournament players. The allure is easy to understand. Nowhere else can you leverage your poker money into such large paydays. A $26 buy in on Full Tilt may pay the winner $4,000-$9,000 and up. A $5 investment may net you $2k-$3k. However, the trade off is, obviously, that you are competing against a large field of players, usually number well into the thousands in these types of examples. So, you need to adjust your strategy to learn to effectively play these games.
I think it is important to adjust your mindset in two different ways to properly learn how to be successful in a MTT. First, quit worrying about winning every tournament you enter. A very good player is only going to money in about one out of 7 or 8 tournaments. Get over the idea of that top spot and that huge payday, as it can lead you to make bad plays.
Chip away at these tournaments like you would eat an elephant: one bite at a time. You cannot win by going all in with your pocket 9′s in the first 10 minutes anyway, so sit back and wait for opportunities. A coin-flip hand is not an opportunity, it is a trap. Much better situations will come up during the course of a tournament than your T-T vs. A-K. If you are the type of player who likes to push with these hands early on, then you shouldn’t be reading this, you should take up something that you are more ideally suited for, like checkers.
Your goal first and foremost is to make the money, that’s it. Concentrate on that and then move up from there.
The other thing most novices to MTT’s do not allow for is TIME. The time frame in which these tournaments are played is often extremely long. Of course, it depends upon the number of entrants, but a tournament with a couple of thousand entries can easily last 8 hours or more.
I hear players all the time make the statement that they got tired, or ran out of time and had to be somewhere, take the wife somewhere, pick up the kids, whatever. Before you pay your entry fee you need to make sure you can allow for the proper amount of time.
Otherwise, what is your strategy? To spend 4 hours playing and then push all in with 9-7 because you have to be at your in-law’s for dinner? That would be rather unsound to say the least.
The time factor is one of the most overlooked aspects of these tournaments. You also have to stay focused. Remember, you only get a 5 minute break every hour. It is not like the WSOP that gives you a dinner break and splits tournaments into several days. You play from the beginning until the end in online MTT’s. You need to be ready for that on a lot of different levels.
These are just a couple examples of factors that need to be considered to be a winning MTT player. Once you have these, you can go on to worrying about how to play your cards!
To purchase my 224 page ebook The No BS Guide to Winning Online No Limit Texas Holdem or live one-on-one coaching sessions with Chris Wilcox, click this https://escient.infusionsoft.com/cart/store.jsp
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