MTT University 102: Tournament Players' Mindset

What it Means to Invest in a Tournament

• Your money and time invested is a sunk cost.
• Constantly reevaluate your position in a tournament.
• Give no thought to whether you've squandered a big stack, or milked a small stack for a long time.
• There is no "right time" for a certain play, there are just good plays and bad plays.
• Stay in the moment!

What it Means to Bust from a Tournament

• A poker tournament is not Russian roulette.
• Think of any non-first place result as a failure, and you'll find yourself much less worried about busting.
• You don't have a tournament "life" - only an investment.
• Take advantage of others' unwillingness to go broke.

The Coin-Flip Question

• It's the first hand of the main event at the WSOP and you're the 100 chip big blind. They deal the cards and a strange thing happens. Everyone folds to the small blind who moves all-in for 20,000. He then accidentally flips his hand over and revels AKs. You then check your own cards and find the old QQ. You've done your homework and know that you have a 53.8 percent chance of winning if you call. What do you do?

Coin-Flip Question: Arguments for Folding

• A good player wants to use his skill to find a better spot for his chips than this one.
• You don't want to risk your entire tournament on one hand as only a small favorite.
• If someone is playing this bad, he'll give you better chances to get his chips later.

Coin-Flip Question: Argument for Calling

• If this were a 1,024 person event, your chance of winning by constantly getting your chips in with this edge would be more than twice as good as the average player. (0.538^10 = .00203 vs. 1/1,024 = .00098)
• If you win, you get to go to work on your new chips immediately and (hopefully) get more.
• Calling doesn't negate our skill edge, calling is our skill edge (because this is not a small edge).
• Now lets make a comparison between the person who calls and the person who folds. The person who calls and wins gets to use his chips right away in an attempt to build a bigger stack which offers him a higher future expectation. The person who decides to wait for a better spot may or may not find one and when/if he finally does, his expectation is lower because of higher blinds and shallower stacks. In comparison, the one who decides to fold will need to find a spot with an edge that is much greater than 53.8% because he passed up on all the future expectation he could have had with a bigger and deeper stack.

Coin-Flip Question: Other Ways to Say it

• A blackjack player never has more than a few percentage points edge.
• A sports bettor probably can't win more than 60% of the time and he needs to win 52.4% just to break even.
• Small edges add up - just ask the casinos.

Your Tournament Philosophy

• You're there to win chips, not to sit there as long as you can, not to protect the chips you have, and not to try to avoid busting. You're there to maximize your investment.
• Your first consideration is almost always to make the best pure poker play possible without worrying about going broke.
• Tournaments differ from cash games mostly because people play differently in them and the stack sizes are often smaller - not because tournaments require an inherently different strategy.

Summary

• Have no fear of busting, it comes with the territory.
• Think about the big picture - you'll play many tournaments in your poker career.
• Stay in the moment and look for whatever edge you can find there.

Although I am not 100% sold on Matt's arguments for the coin-flip question, he has given me some good things to think about. I am definitely one of those players who tend to pass up on smaller edges in hopes of finding a bigger one later, but I am beginning to think that it is suboptimal to do so.

On one hand, it's natural for a player to want to last as long as possible which often means passing up on smaller edges. On the other hand, it makes a lot of sense to take most if not all edges regardless of how small they are as you would in a cash game. MTTs should play the same as cash games because of the top heavy pay structure but almost everyone tends to play them too tight, passing up on small edges, because they think there is some inherent value in outlasting the next person. 

When it's all said and done, our goal is to accumulate all the chips in play and the only way to do so is to take risks. The question we should ask ourselves is "Is the expectation of this particular spot (risk to reward) higher than the expectation of future spots?" I'll use an example to make this more clear. Is it better to take a 53/47 edge where we either double up or bust or is it better to pass up on this small edge because we can find bigger edges in the future? The question is subjective and difficult to answer, but it also brings to light another question. Are we over estimating our edge and the potential of future edges? Because of how hard it is to answer these questions with any kind of accuracy, it may be better to approach MTTs objectively by taking all edges as they come our way.

I am a bit torn on what mindset is best. I decided to do some research on OPR by checking some of the top players' finish distributions compared to OPR's average. It seems that most of them have a lower Early (~5% vs 10%) and Early Middle (~14% vs 20%) finish, but higher Middle, Middle Late, and Late finishes. I'm not sure what this exactly means but it would seem that they either avoid thin spots Early resulting in lower E and EM finishes or they severely outplay their opponent's post-flop. 

I think once I am able to find and adopt the correct mindset, it will raise my game to the next level. I need to figure this out! I want to know how some of the best players approach MTTs!