Game Selection in MTTs

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As a coach, I’m involved in frequent discussions with my students about game selection in MTTs, since it’s such a tricky concept. Many players start out their poker career unsure of exactly which direction to take, what to focus on, and how to keep their game progressing. People are torn between building a bankroll, developing their game, and minimising variance – all valid concerns, but all dragging them in different directions.

The first thing to take note of is that if you’ve made the decision between whether to focus on cash games, MTTs, SNGs, mixed games, or some other specific format, you’ve already taken a step towards making it easier on yourself. That’s good game selection right there. It’s much harder to make progress if you’re trying to become a ‘jack of all trades’ early on. You can’t get traction or build a bankroll quite so easily.

However, since the fact you’re on TPE in the first place probably means you decided to focus on playing tournaments, I’m afraid I have some bad news for you – in making it easy on yourself by choosing one format to focus on, you also made it exponentially harder on yourself by choosing MTTs. That’s not to say MTTs are the toughest format of the game to succeed in, necessarily, but in many ways they are the hardest form of the game in which to develop as a player.

The reasons for this are diverse – for one thing, the level of variance involved with the large-field tournaments found at lower buyins means it could take you a huge sample of games to actually realise any of your EV, even if you’re a solid winning player. In addition to that, MTTs tend to take a long time to finish, often up to 8 hours or even longer, which makes them significantly less convenient for those recreational players who work a full-time job.

They also feature such wildly different playing conditions from one hand to the next – stack sizes, player types, table dynamics – that it takes a long time before you start to gain experience in each aspect of the game. Even in the early stages of a tournament, an MTT player might experience a certain specific situation 5 or 10 times in a session at most, whereas a cash player or SNG player might play a virtually identical hand 100 times a day. Similarly, it takes a certain amount of experience for an MTT player to even start making final tables regularly, let alone play optimally once they get there, so the skill set of final table play and ICM adjustment becomes even harder to develop.

So what does this mean for aspiring MTT players? Well, it means it’s going to take a while for you to work out how good you actually are, for one thing. It’s going to take time to overcome the high levels of variance in low-stakes, large-field tournaments. It also means that the bankroll you need in order to play MTTs at those stakes is probably a lot larger than you think, if you actually want to guarantee not going broke.

Bankroll management is a very subjective thing, so I won’t go into it here, but suffice it to say, if you fixate on how much money you’re losing or making when playing low-stakes MTTs, you’re going to end up frustrated, because the variance is astronomical. This seems counter-intuitive, because many people get into poker in the first place because it’s something that can help them make money. So there’s a not insignificant number of people who take up poker because they think it’s a fun way to make some extra cash, find out that making that cash is a lot harder than they think, and then give up because they tried for 6 months and lost $2k.

How can you avoid being one of these people? Well, firstly I would say it’s important to have a format of the game that serves as your ‘backup option’ – if you’re going through a downswing, or don’t have time to play a full MTT session but want to get in some volume, or you’re low on confidence, or simply feeling under the weather, this can be a lifesaver. For me, this game is PokerStars 180-man turbo SNGs – I know I can beat them for a good winrate, they’re much lower variance than MTTs, and I can 24-table them while playing my B-game and still make money, because they’re pretty soft.

For the rest of you, it could be anything – it could be 180s, it could be 45-man SNGs, it could be single-table SNGs, microstakes cash games, or some other lower-variance form of the game. The more this ‘backup option’ helps serve your MTT game, the better – for example, 180s help me to keep my push/fold and ICM knowledge up to scratch. Cash games might help you get better at deep-stacked play, or heads-up SNGs could help you really improve your range analysis skills.

If you have a ‘backup option’ in place, it’ll give you a few things – added bankroll security to reduce stress during MTT downswings, more options in terms of times of the day or week you can play, and a lower level of overall variance in your game. In essence, what I’m saying here is that the most fundamental part of MTT game selection is to really think about whether exclusively playing MTTs is right for you. If you decide it is, you should at least consider adding small field MTTs on smaller, non-PokerStars sites to your schedule to decrease your variance just a little.

Once you’ve decide which games you’re going to focus on – we’ll assume you came to the conclusion that you’d play MTTs plus one other lower-variance format – it’s then time to think about which MTTs you should play in particular. After all, for those of us outside the United States (and I’m really sorry US readers, I am not trying to rub it in your face here!), the selection of poker sites and tournaments on offer has never been broader than it is today.

I’ll bring this article to a close by giving you what you probably came for – a guide to the factors you should consider when deciding on an MTT schedule. Obviously there are some additional nuances beyond what I’m about to list, but I think this should be a good start.

Field size – I already mentioned this, but if you’re playing large-field tournaments, there’s going to be a ton of variance. Anything upwards of 500 players should probably be placed in this category, which means that all those low-stakes MTTs on PokerStars with upwards of 5,000 players…they’re pretty crazy. The fact they exist is a credit to Stars as a company, but you shouldn’t play too many of them.

Field toughness – obviously this requires a certain amount of pre-existing knowledge about the site you’re playing on and the player pool you’re part of. But it goes without saying that you want to play the softest tournaments you can and avoid the toughest ones, so if you look through a tournament lobby before registering and everyone in it is a well-known ‘reg’, it’s okay to skip it. Some people enjoy testing themselves against better players, and that’s fine, but after a certain point it just becomes a bad decision to play a tournament where your ROI might only be 2-5%.

Structure – there are lots of ‘regs’ who register every midstakes hyper-turbo they can find. This is almost certainly a mistake. Even the best players only achieve negligible ROIs over decent samples in those games, so unless you’ve played hyper-turbo SNGs for years, you’re probably better off skipping it. Likewise, playing too many turbos in general can be a big mistake. Look for tournaments with good, deep-stacked structures that will allow you to exercise the edge you have on your weaker opponents.

Buyin level – again, this somewhat goes without saying, but you shouldn’t play buyins you can’t afford. In fact, my policy on this subject is more along the lines of ‘play the highest games you know you can beat’, in contrast to most people’s policy of ‘play the highest games you can afford’. The latter just leads to losing money before you discover you’re not a winning player. It also goes without saying that while there are weak players at every buyin level, there are fewer and fewer the higher you go.

Player pool – this is somewhat similar to ‘field toughness’, but a little different. The player pools on PokerStars.fr, for example, vary wildly from those on PokerStars.com. The French version of the site is a lot softer. The same goes for a lot of other lesser-known European sites. If you currently play most of your volume on PokerStars and/or Full Tilt Poker, it’s worth considering moving some of your volume to other sites, for the sake of increasing your overall ROI.

Prize pool – this is the one that can give you a good reason to break some of your other rules. In circumstances where a tournament is available that presents too good an opportunity to pass up – for example, say you normally don’t play on PokerStars for the sake of variance reduction, but you see that they’re offering a $1million guarantee version of the Sunday Storm, an $11 buyin – it is perfectly acceptable, and indeed in many cases optimal, to bend your usual rules for game selection. Even if you don’t normally play turbos, some of the PokerStars ‘Hot’ tournaments can be a great route to a $10k payday if you run good. Given the rarity of these opportunities, it’s often worth sacrificing a little in the way of variance for the sake of not passing up these special promotional tournaments, especially if you can satellite in for cheap and cheat the poker gods in the short run.

As I mentioned, there are some additional nuances to the concept which are often specific to the individual. But in general, as long as you strike a balance between striving for those big-money paydays, reducing variance for consistent success, and focusing on improving your game, you’ll find that game selection gets easier with experience. It’s never a finished process, and it’s important to keep evolving your choices and processes, but as long as you make the right choices off the table as well as on it, you’ll be off to a great start.