Tournaments Are Bad = Hulk Smash!

[Part 2 of 2] - Part 1 here.

While understanding the allure of tournament poker, there are also reasons why MTT poker might not be the best use of your time at the felt.

Time is money and tournaments don't pay you for your time. You can play tremendous poker for 5 hours and lose to a bad beat. With the turn of a card, you're eliminated with nothing to show for it. 5+ hours with an ROI of -100%.

I have to say this often tilts me and I haven't quite found a way to overcome it. Usually I'm mentally exhausted and have to take a recess from poker for about 24 hours (or more).

(Remember Grasshopper... playing good poker sometimes has to be it's own reward.)

Opponents in a tournament are not your friends. While you may know a few folks at the table, no one is going to willingly help you win a tournament. In fact, quite the opposite is true: Your opponents will angle shoot or cheat you every chance they get.

There are several examples of this. The one that comes to mind is the most recent WCOOP main event at PokerStars, where a top finisher was disqualified for multi-accounting.

Heck, the only live casino tourney I've ever played had two Pakistani brothers who were eventually DQ'd for continuing to talk their native tongue (to each other) during hands.

The poker sites & casinos are no friends either. The sites are basically paid for running the tournament. While they want the tourneys to appear fair, many sites do little to stop cheating.

Here is an excellent essay (NSFW avatars & replies) by Dan Druff. It discusses the "fairness" of online poker, given the cheating scandals unearthed at AP and UB.

Also, live tourneys are rife with problems, people shorting pots, etc. that tournament directors and floor people have very little intention of policing. You must be keenly focused and aware to avoid collusion and angle shooting.

Don't forget that unless you are a great tourney player, the rake you pay in casino MTT's (usually a pretty steep 20%) is not worth it.

Variance is a bad mutha. MTT's have the highest form of variance in poker. This means you can play well above expectation and not see one cent. I have linked to a post by Bodog Ari before, where he states he has never cashed in more than 4 consecutive tourneys, and that he had once gone 38 consecutive tourneys without a cash.

He is one of the best 100 or so tourney players on the planet and this is well within "normal" variance. I went 1 cash for 24 tourneys to start 2008 and I was ready to pull my hair out. To be a good tourney player you must handle rejection repeatedly.

To sum everything up, I find playing tourneys to be occasional fun but I do not yet have the stamina to grind them daily. (And this comes from a winning MTT player).

I prefer to play a regimen of cash games, where I can earn rakeback for my time at the tables, and I can use my patience to wait for the nuts without fear of getting blinded off.

Yet every spring I find that moment when the WSOP satellites begin and I still think I can donk my way to fame and fortune. Thankfully that moment only lasts for a week or so.