Transitioning From:Cash To:MTT Stage 1 - Patience

Rip_AA — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 02:25:00 GMT

Over the past few years I have been playing almost entirely in cash games. I dabbled in tourney play here and there, but because of football and classes it did not work into my schedule to put in the volume necessary. At the time I didn’t understand how much time, determination, or focus was needed to become a good tournament player or how to manage a bankroll effectively for tournament play.

One of the reasons why I crossed over to the MTT realm was due to the notoriety and pride that comes with being a winning player. The best cash game players in the world are hardly known, but the best tournament players are widely recognized: John Juanda, Barry Greenstein, Scotty Nguyen, as well as many others. Another reason for me focusing strictly on tournament play is due to a proposition bet that I and a fellow p5er assembled to find out who can play/run better over the rest of the year.

My transition from the cash game to MTT’s was in three stages, which I will be detailing what I have learned over playing mainly tournaments over the last few months. In this first article, I will highlight the patience aspect of MTT poker.

When I’m at a live or online casino playing cash games most people play rather vanilla and it is usually easily distinguishable over the first hour or so of who is going to play back at you or make setup plays. In MTT’s, depending on table draw and change, you may be sitting at the same table for as long as a few hours or only a few minutes. This means that setting up those plays and knowing which guy is going to cause trouble may just be pure luck.

I sometimes will make –EV plays against a player that doesn’t switch gears or isn’t able to pull his head out of the sand when I do have a hand. The patience to pull off a play like this is something that at first I just felt like I had to over and outplay my opponents in order to build up a stack. This approach happened to leave me on sidelines and also increase my variance due to only going deep in a few MTT’s versus many which I could have gone deep in had I been patient.

Waiting to pick spots is fine early/late, but at some point gambling is almost a necessity of playing MTT’s. Going after players who have been raising excessively and definitely players who raise light/speculatively is a key to building up a stack.

This last paragraph brings me into the next stage, mistakes, which I will highlight in a few days to come.