Multi-Table Tournaments (MTTs) are currently very popular due in large part to the success of televising the World Poker Tour Tournaments and the World Series of Poker Tournaments. Thousands of players test their luck and skills daily online and in physical tournaments. However, few players seem to think much about whether they should have entered the tournament. They seem to enter only to compete. It doesn’t seem to matter how many people have entered the contest. The lower the entry fee, the larger the tournament field. It is not uncommon for $1, $2, and $5 tournaments to attract between 1,500 and 2,500 entrants.
A player can practice and compete for very little cost. But is that really true? Just because the entry fee is small doesn’t mean the expense was worth it. If you don’t have the skills to make it to the final table and more importantly win, you’d better buy a lottery ticket. Two dollars spent weekly on a pair of lottery tickets could actually result in a lucky prize. Two bucks spent on an MTT will never result in enough lucky cards to win if you really don’t have enough poker skills and aren’t improving. You may not even make a final table.
So how do you gauge whether you should play a multi-table tournament? To get started, you should only enter a tournament if you intend to play to win. Don’t go in to practice. Always strive to improve your skills, but only enter because you want to win. Because the entry fee is low, a commonly seen strategy is the manic or suicidal attacker. This type of player is all-in early and often. The strategy is to quickly double or triple. If they lose, they rationalize that this is the price they must pay to gain a quick chip advantage. But this strategy is only worthwhile if they also employ the same strategy when the entry fee is $10,000 instead of $2. If such a player would not bet early in a high-entry tournament, such as a WPT event, then why Why waste your time and money developing a strategy that could only help once in a low-entry tournament?
To reiterate, only enter a tournament because you want to win. Don’t go in just to practice. Just as important, go in with a strategy that you think can be applied to tournaments with increasingly higher entry fees. Why settle for being a $1-$20 tournament player? Play to win at this low level. But play to win with a strategy that will also win at the starting level of $100-$1000.
And how do you know you’re developing a winning strategy and skill set? You know because you’ve made it to the final table and you’ve won. But even this is not enough. You have to make it to the final table and win profitably.
In other words, you need to know your MTT win frequency. Once you know this number, you will know what size tournaments to enter. You start to find this number by first making an educated guess. Estimate the number of tournaments you will need to participate in before winning one. For example, assume you will win a tournament within your first 50 entries. Assuming you’re right and you win a tournament with your 50th entry, then first prize must pay more than 50 times the entry fee or you’ll still lose money.
Let’s say, for example, that you enter 50 $10 tournaments. At the end of 50 tickets, you will have spent $500. For the typical tournament, the first prize pays 20-30% of the total tournament entry fees. If the tournament you entered pays 25% to the winner and at least 200 people enter at $10 each, then the total prize pool is $2,000. 25% of 2000 is $500. You’ve won. Congratulations! You just broke even and spent all of the tournament time to win nothing. If each MTT took on average 4 hours to complete, and on average lasted about 2 hours per tournament, then you went 100 hours without winning anything. In other words, each tournament you enter must pay out more than the number of tournament buy-ins you estimated would be needed to win. If you win only once every 100 tournaments, you must enter tournaments that pay more than 100 times the first-place entry fee. Participating in smaller paying tournaments guarantees that you will win less than the full cost of your 100 entry fees.
But what about the times you end up in the money but don’t win or make the final table? Consider those finishes nice, but they won’t pay the bills. Usually 60-70% of the total prize pool is paid out to the final table. That means you need to make the final table to have any chance of making any decent money. Anything lower than 9th or 10th will only pay out enough to cover the cost of a few tournament tickets. Finishing in 40th place awards you between 0.4 (4/10 of 1%) and 0.6% (6/10 of 1%) of the prize pool. In dollar terms, this is 3 to 7 times the entrance fee. Just to break even, you need to finish no less than 40 every 3-7 times you enter a tournament.
In other words, his finals in the money will only help subsidize the full cost of entry fees until he eventually wins or consistently makes the final table.
Therefore, in order to find out which tournaments are worth participating in, you need to keep track of the entry fee, the number of participants, the number of paid places, their completion and the amount you won. Only then will the poker skills and strategies you have worked to develop pay off for you.
To be a truly successful player in Multi Table Tournaments, you need to know your winning frequency. Only then will you know if the size of the tournament and its payout structure are worth entering. Without this knowledge, you are reduced to being an ostrich player; that is, a gambler who plays with his head in the sand, never knowing if his occasional wins or late-money wins have any chance of paying off. Without knowing your win rate, you will never be able to advance to the higher buy-in fee tournaments with any level of confidence.
Rest assured, the best professionals know your win frequency. Without this knowledge, they would quickly be bankrupt. It costs $1 million to enter 100 WPT tournaments. (100 x 10,000 = 1,000,000). If a professional enters and wins a WPT tournament once out of 100 times, he needs to win more than $1 million when he wins to win money. If, for example, a player ultimately wins a tournament on his 100th try and the first prize payout is 35% of a $2,000,000 purse, then he would win $700,000. That’s great, right? Not precisely! Remember, this is the 100th attempt. He has spent $1 million dollars. Not knowing his win frequency, this player still has $300,000 in the hole and is going broke fast. Hopefully, this player has won $300,000 with some money results in some of the other 99 tournaments he’s entered before. But this only brings you to the breakeven point.
In other words, this player needs to improve his win frequency to 70 or below if he is going to continue to play tournaments where the first prize payout is less than his win frequency.
As mentioned, winning a tournament that matches your win frequency will only result in breaking even. To truly succeed in tournaments, you must enter tournaments that have a first prize that exceeds your personal winning frequency. A good rule of thumb is to enter tournaments that pay out a first prize of at least double your win frequency. Therefore, if you can win one out of 100 tournaments you enter, the first prize pool must be at least 200 times the entry fee. For example, a tournament entry fee of $100 should have a first prize of $20,000 if you can win once out of 100 entries. One hundred tickets would cost you $10,000 and you have won $20,000. You have now won $10,000. If, as in the example above, you have spent an average of 2 hours per tournament, then you have 200 hours invested. This means that you have earned $50 per hour for your efforts ($10,000/200=$50).
Simple economics guarantees that the amateur and professional will slowly go out of business if their win frequency is less than the payout for the tournaments they win. So ignoring your win frequency number will only guarantee your eventual exit from MTT poker. Don’t let this happen to you. Take the time to keep track of your results and then you can choose tournaments that pay out at a rate that will make you a real winner when you win it. Never enter tournaments that pay out a first prize that is less than double your MTT win frequency. Without knowing this number, you will never win money in the MTT game.