Pud's Poker Progress / Matthew Pitt / 15 August 2011 /

Over the past couple of months I have been grinding away at the short-handed cash games and doing pretty well for myself. Although I was only been playing micro-stakes I managed to win something like 19 buy-ins over the course of 25,000 hands, which is good going in my book. Then something happened and I decided to try my arm at MTTSNG, reporting on poker tournaments is what happened.

Behind every poker journalist is a frustrated poker player, and that certainly runs true with me. I have said of late that if I am not good enough to put my theory into practice constantly and win at the highest games then I am fortunate enough to make a living out of those who are doing so. One way to make money from them doing the live updates from the various circuits, something I love doing. But working on the circuit always makes me want to play in tournaments when I sit down and play poker online and each time I do I am left disappointed, have my confidence crushed and am left questioning my ability. This previous attempt at breaking into tournaments has been no different and I think I am ready to put online tournament poker behind me for good.

Since last Tuesday I have played exactly 150 MTTSNG, the 45-man turbo version and I have been destroyed in every way you can imagine. Those 150 games were played over six session, all of them ended in disappointment and financial losses, each of them making me question WTF I was doing playing in them in the first place! I managed to cash in 14.0% of the games I played but my ROI was a dreadful minus 43.7%. The ITM figure is probably about right but the distribution of cashes needed to be more towards the top three than the bottom three as I only won a single tournament, came second twice and third once from the 150 game sample.

In contrast to that I finished in sixth or seventh (seven paid in these games) 11 times and burst the bubble 15 times. FML! Naturally I was worried that my bubble play was awful so I downloaded SNG Wiz and discovered that almost all of my play on the bubble was spot on, which strangely made the fact I was losing even more depressing, despite the fact I could actually put it down to variance. Also, over the 150 games I played I ran more than 100,000 chips under EV and managed to run into AA or KK a total of 16 times in situations where I would have been propelled to chip leader or thereabouts with 8-14 players remaining.

All of the above is basically a big fat whinge in the face of Lady Variance, the horrible bitch, but in reality it may just be that my own way of playing poker, and No Limit Hold'em in particular, just is not suited to this particular format of poker tournament. My Holdem Manager statistics show that I play best and are most profitable when both my opponents and I are playing 85-150 big blinds deep, which is almost never in these games and hardly ever in any online tournament for that matter. It may be a different story in a WPT, WSOP or EPT Main Event but I'm as likely to play in one of those in the next few months as I am flying to the moon by the power of my arse.

Another reason I don't think me and tournament poker will ever really get on is that I play quite loosely, which is fine and dandy when you can reload when you inevitably get stacked but not so much when a mistake can result in you sitting on the sidelines for the rest of the night. Also, I'll admit to being a bit of a station too and love to hero call, which really isn't cool in a tournament scenario. Likewise I love to try force folds by representing hands etc but that hardly works in tournaments either because villain has like 19 big in his stack and doesn't care if you're representing middle set because he has king-high and is looking for a double up. You're just never deep enough to play poker how I like to play it and you're never deep enough to have fun with weird cards too, something that keeps the fun alive when you're grinding and when you add all those factors together and combine them with how I love being able to just get up and leave in a cash game it is a no brainer really.

So it looks like the online tournament scene is dead for me. I'll still play the odd one with friends and maybe also try to satellite into some of the higher buy-in MTTs etc from time to time but there will be no more grinding dozens and scores of MTTs or MTTSNGs for the foreseeable future if ever. Until further notice you will find me at the cash tables.

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