Tourney Month Review

Played my last session of tournaments on Sunday and managed to finish with a nice 2nd place in the PKR High Roller special ($530 buyin).  The 2nd place prize was $10.4k and so makes my 2nd five figure score of the year.  PKR tournaments are just the nuts.  The structures are usually very good and typically have smaller fields (relative to some of the massive ones you can get in FTP and Stars tournaments) so you go into every tournament feeling you have a very realistic chance of winning.  Smaller fields also reduce variance which is a useful thing in the life of donkaments. Let's not forget PKR tournaments are also rather soft and this one wasn't any different.  One player was open shoving 40+bbs with about 20 players left, mixed in with some 4xing and the occasional post flop overbet shove.  After doing this for a while, he decided to sit out and not come back until he had blinded out about an hour and a half later (somehow this was on the final table lol).

I've had a few different thoughts on tournaments throughout the month, but will just write down what comes to mind now.  Firstly, I think a skill that is essential for a tourney grinder is the ability to grind a lot of tables (I'm talking 16+) for long periods of time.  This is a skill I do not possess, and one that will be very difficult, if not impossible to learn (not that I want to anyway).  I've never been too adept at playing a lot of tables in cash, and rarely play more than six at a time.  I also will usually play for a maximum of three hours per session.  I had intended to play about 300 tournaments this month but ended up doing a paltry 140.  This was because I would lose interest after a few hours of playing and stop registering.

I came across this blog of a well known tourney grinder and he describes a schedule he had been keeping to in order to try to win a player of the year race.  It went as follows:

4-6pm: get up, run errands and figure out some dinner arrangement
6pm-9am: play poker 20-30 tabling throughout almost the entire sesison.
9am-4pm: sleep

Although obviously this is by no means a 'normal' schedule for a tournament grinder, it gives you can idea of the kind of dedication you would need to be up there with the best and more successful players.  This guy was playing 120 tournaments a day, and I did 140 in a month lol.

I really don't understand how people can do tournaments for a living unless they are happy to put in ridiculous volume, or have loads of money behind them so they are not under pressure to make money over the course of say, a year.  With the variance being so massive, you just don't get rewarded regularly enough for playing well, like you do in cash games.  I can see how the casual player likes a tournament because they see the potential for the massive payoff (and they have a chance if they have some vague idea of what they are doing), a bit like how a slot machine has a jackpot.  I think tournaments also appeal to the competitive poker player who wants to actually 'win' and tournaments are the best way of becoming recognised as being superior to your peers.

This blog post is becoming rambly and rather unorganised so I'll bring it to and end.  Overall I paid around $15k in entries to tournaments in the month with prizes of approximately $20k, leaving me with a profit of $5k.  I'm pretty happy with this, as this is probably around what my expectation is over this sample.

I was looking forward to getting back in the cash games this month, but such is life and poker, in my first session back I got absolutely crushed!