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We hear this complaint quite often, especially from highly-ranked or successful players. It is usually caused by yet another frustrating Sunday where the player managed to get busted from every major tournament thanks to a series of bad beats to recreational players. Some players have even gone so far as to suggest that they are giving up playing on Sundays because they can’t take anymore frustration.

Are these feelings reasonable and should a winning player eschew playing on Sundays and just concentrate on regular weekday tournaments? I’ve taken a look at this issue to see if it has any merit and I’m sharing my findings with you today.

I keep detailed records of all my online cash-prize MTTs and I’ve built a database of over 2000 MTTs played over the last two years or so. Out of my total I have played 335 “Sunday Majors” and over 1800 other online cash-prize MTTs. I define a Sunday Major as an MTT played on a Sunday that has a large field and/or a large guaranteed cash prize that is not held on any other day of the week.

Looking at my records I currently have a total return-on-investment (ROI) of +59% from all cash-prize MTTs and a Sunday Majors ROI of +55%. That’s a small difference, well within the statistical variance I expect after so many MTTs and therefore cannot explain any frustration with playing the Sunday Majors.

I’ve also looked at my in-the-money (ITM) rate and it is 17% for all MTTs and 14% for Sunday Majors. That is a more significant difference and may go some way to explaining the frustration, but given that my profitability levels are similar it doesn’t seem like a big factor either, so what could be the explanation for Sunday Syndrome?

Drilling down a little deeper into my results I found one glaring data point. On Sunday, 9th March 2008 I made all of the profits I’ve ever made in Sunday Majors. Apart from that day my ROI for Sunday Majors is -17%. So in essence every Sunday that I have played except one has been a frustrating, losing experience. That’s not strictly true because those other Sundays include some nice Sunday Major cashes and a big win in a non-Sunday Major MTT, but the overall message is clear: there are not many good Sundays in the career of an online MTT professional.

Having established this fact, I then tried to understand why this was the case and the answer came back pretty clearly: the tournaments are much bigger on Sundays and are a minefield of winning or losing races, bad beats, suckouts and coolers.

I’ve written in a previous article that all of your profits as an MTT pro come from finishing in the top three places of the MTTs that you enter. All of the other ITM finishes and Final Tables won’t earn you a cent in this game unless you convert enough of them into Top 3s. And the simple fact is that no matter how good of a player you are, you will achieve a lower ratio of Top 3 finishes in larger-field tournaments, as I will now show in the analysis below.

Before I get into the figures let me address the argument that the fields on Sundays are softer and a good player should achieve better results than on a regular weekday. In terms of long-term expectation I believe this argument has some merit, but it can take a very large number of Sundays to achieve this long-term expectation. My own results do not show better performance on Sundays than regular weekdays so for the purposes of this analysis I am setting aside any differences in realistic expectations between playing Sunday Majors or regular weekday tournaments.

That is not to say that players, especially winning players, don’t have unrealistic expectations on Sundays. Indeed it may be the anticipation of achieving a major score on a Sunday that contributes to the frustration, but I don’t think that’s the driving reason for frustrating Sundays. The driving reason comes from the cold hard statistics.

Here is a summary of the typical set of Sunday Majors that I play, designating the buy-in, the average field size (AFS) and including the expected rate of Top 3s for each tournament for an average player, a +50% ROI player and a +100% ROI player.

We can see that the Top 3 rate is low, less than 1% in all cases even for the highly skilled +100% player in the smallest field. Translating this into the chances of not achieving any Top 3 finishes on any given Sunday and calculating this for a series of Sundays gives the following results:

This shows that the average player will take well over a year of playing six majors every Sunday to have a good Sunday. Moreover, around one-fifth of average players will not have a good Sunday after three years! A +50% ROI player will have to wait an average of almost 10 months between successful Sundays and even a +100% player can only expect a happy Sunday every 7.5 months or so. The remaining Sundays will be frustrating affairs as the players suffer the inevitable lost races, bad beats and coolers.

Contrast these results to a regular weekday schedule of six MTTs.

Here we can see that players only have to wait an average of 4 – 10 days for a good day. That’s certainly a lot less frustrating and explains the Sunday syndrome and the Monday morning blues.

I’ve shown why Sundays can be so frustrating, but I haven’t found any evidence that winning players should avoid playing Sunday Majors. Keep plugging away at these suckers and eventually you’ll get that big score that makes up for all those other dreary Sundays.