Belgium 
Canada 
China 
Germany 
Denmark 
Spain 
France 
United Kingdom 
Croatia 
Ireland 
Italy 
Japan 
Korea 
Netherlands 
Poland 
Romania 
Serbia 
Russian Federation 
Sweden 
Thailand 
United States 
Vietnam 
Bear in mind that in choosing to play MTT Poker exclusively you are opting for the highest variant form of poker that exists, and it’s not even close. There are ways to manage our relationship with the peaks and troughs of variance, our reactions to bad beats and the like, which I touched on in my last post. There are ways to manage the variance itself as well, to lower it if we wish to.
Ironing out the Numbers
If 
you play a tournament of a thousand people, and you’re of average ability for that field of players, you’ll win it outright once in every thousand times you play. If you have a decent skill edge on the field, you’ll win it perhaps once every nine hundred times you play. In one tournament luck plays a profound and dominant role – in 10,000 tournaments it plays an extremely minimal role. It takes many thousands of games to iron out the luck element in these games, simply due to the enormous field sizes.
The Draw
MTTs are not for everyone. They take many hours of endurance and sheer time commitment, and the swings and close calls can be cruelly punishing for even the most congenial and relaxed of personalities. For some people myself included, they possess a curious fascination which cash games lack, due to several of their unique design features.
The first of these is the dynamic nature of MTT tournaments, in which your working stack will shift from anywhere between three hundred down to under five big blinds at different stages of a tournament, where our opponents ranges will likewise shift depending on effective stacks, the stage and buy-in of the tournament, and other structural aspects such as whether the game is a re-buy or a freezeout, a knockout or a shootout.
Cash games can be dipped in and out of, in MTTs we strap in for a session of perhaps six to twenty hours and burn through the tables all day or all night. I personally have chosen to grind MTTs alongside an active family life with my young daughter and a home-based job writing and teaching / coaching. I choose to limit my full MTT sessions to 3-4 week at the moment, so as to have a good balance with everything else going on in my life. This does mean I am more at the mercy of variance than some high volume grinders, especially as I play a decent proportion of my games on Sundays, when the fields are at their softest and hugest.
A Tough Call
MTT
Poker is not a game choice which makes sense for all players. They are not made for those with a volatile temperament, as emotions and energies are stored up and expended over many hours, and critical pots can be lost on a flip of a bad card which took half a day of hard-thought concentration and good decisions to build up. Pressure points can be pretty demanding in these kinds of spots, and it’s no picnic. But if you can take it in your stride and laugh it off, more power to you – you just might be made for MTTs.
These are not a game choice for anyone requiring a weekly or monthly “nut” of income from poker. You will have hot and cold months, and hot and cold quarters playing large field MTTs. The best in the world have losing years, but this shouldn’t be so much the case for a good small or mid stakes player. A losing spread of some months is still very standard though, or of a couple thousand games.
Controlling the Variance Swings
If
you do want to play MTTs yet control the swings, there are ways to do it. You can try to keep your AFS (average field size) under 1000 players, for example. This will mean skipping out on some of the best value events of the week, so there is a variance / value play-off to be considered here. Especially if grinding the micros this can be a tough thing to achieve as many of these have mammoth fields. Aleksey calls it grinding out in the trenches and I remember why!
You can also skip out on the tougher games where you feel your expected ROI (return on investment) is thin – remember there’s a relationship between expected ROI and variance – if you expect 30% ROI from a certain game / buy-in level, rather than 10%, you’ll be able to weather the buffets of variance’s fortune and the swell of the swings that much more easily.
You can also balance those big games with capped fields, 180-mans or smaller sit and go’s. But do bear in mind that it’s a choice - whether you wish or need to lower variance in your game selection really depends on your bankroll, your character and also your needs or wishes in poker. If you want a more regular income, less stress about the swings of fortune, or you just want to use a more liberal poker bankroll strategy – lower variance is your friend. If you want to play maximum value, maximum variance and don’t mind about the swings you can embrace variance and take the ride.
Article By LuckyLuke
