Hey, I’m throwing this out there to see if anybody has any general comments or advice. I’ve been playing a lot of SnG and Multi-Table tournaments lately and I do pretty well with the SnG’s. I had a little bad run lately but even with that bad run I’ve been placing in the money in the $5/$1 and $10/$1 games about 34% of the time. Even when I don’t place in the money I’ve gone out in 4th or 5th spot. I play mostly limit games but I’ve gotten involved in a few NL SnG games and I do pretty well there too. I only have about 30 – 40 games under my belt so I know it’s difficult to draw any long view conclusions from my current results but I really feel that I can solidly beat these games.
My problem is the multi-table tournaments (MTT). I can’t seem to make it to the money. I’ll play a tourney with 500 entries, paying out to the top 50 or so and I’ll go out in 98th spot. The storyline for most of these games goes like this:
I play very tight and then aggressive if I catch a nice piece of the flop. Otherwise I get off the hand if there’s more than a few other players in. I’ll catch one or two hands early and increase my chips from 1500 up to 2000 or 2500 and for a short time I’ll be listed in the money (usually in the top 10 spots). Then I can’t buy a hand. I sit there orbit after orbit and see nothing but J6o, 29s, Q3o, etc. The blinds start eating away at my chips and other players are in there taking down pots and I’ll enter the first break somewhere in the middle of the pack. After the break, I usally get a playable hand in the first orbit and I get hammered. I’ll get AKs (or something like that) and have a flush draw on the flop and somebody will make me bleed to see the turn and river and . . . of course, I don’t pair up nor do I hit my flush. Now I’m crippled and I sit there and wait for a playable hand while the blinds eat me up and when I finally get a playable hand I have no power. All I can do is push all in and my stack is so short nobody even thinks twice to call me. Half the time I win and end up with only a slightly less small stack or I see the person call me flip up 63o and draw out on me with trips or two pair against my QQ.
Any advice here? Every now and then I do take a shot on the button with a weak hand just to see if I can catch a lucky flop and I’ll try to see a flop with suited connectors in an unraised pot with lots of callers but for the most part I’m playing pretty tight. I’ve tried loosening up my starting hand requirements as an experiment in a few games but that didn’t seem to change the script significantly. Is this just how MTT work? Skill only gets you so far and then you need to get lucky to advance past a certain point?