Marcus Bateman / Marcus Bateman / 10 October 2008 / Leave a comment

So it's all finally come together for you, you've bought into a big multi table tournament, you've played your heart out and finally taken down that big score. Time to go pro and buy a new car? Actually probably not the wisest idea for your long term success, as the dynamics of multi table tournaments are such that any big score is not quite as big as it seems.

The problem is that MTT's have extremely high variance. Although they have the great allure of being able to turn a small amount of money into a much larger amount (often over 100x the initial buy in), this has the consequence that it is extremely difficult to ever win the big money in any single tournament. This means that when you finally pick up a big score, you have to look at it in a long term way.

If you could show the profit graph of a successful MTT player over a few thousand tournaments, you would see that it would have a gradual downward theme, as they consistently bust out of most tournaments, with a big upward spike every now and then when they pick up a big score. You need to hold onto quite large chunks of any big win to weather the constant small sums you are losing along the way when you bust out before the money (which is the usual result for even the very best MTT players in most tournaments).

If we take a look at reasonable long term return on investments, or 'roi' (which tells you how much money you will make back on each dollar investment) from the best online multi table tournament players you can get a much clearer picture of quite what is going on when playing MTTs. Betfair's very own Annette 'Annette_15' Obrestad has a long term roi of between 100-150 percent. This means that for every dollar she buys in with, she makes between one dollar and one dollar fifty profit (plus her original stake back of course).

Here you can see clearly that although the wins come in massive sums, the long term money is actually made quite slowly and surely by the best players, and protecting your bankroll is critical to deal with the long term variance. Just as if you made a few buy ins playing cash you wouldn't just go and immediately spend it all, so it should be with your big tournament wins - otherwise you might just find yourself going broke quicker than you thought.

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