Making a profit. MTT’s And SNG’s. A General Poker Strategy.
We’ve all had that thought.
What if I could just win it big once?
You know you’re good but whenever you take a shot you get knocked back down.
If you decided to take poker seriously then you’ve got choices about how you’d like to do it. Personally I don’t have the money to deposit big and work from there but if your confident enough to do it and have seen nothing been a good return on investment when you’ve played previously then I’d say do it.
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I’ve always preferred tournament style poker to cash games. Now it might be an irrational fear but to me but cash games are there to win lots of money really fast and then lose it all just as fast. It may be due to the fact that when I first started playing I lost $200 in ring game poker, but that’s another story.
I was searching for general poker strategies and although I did find some good ones for specific parts of the game and for bankroll management. For the more general strategies most seem to assume that you play ring games. I myself do not, playing only Single table tournaments (STTs) and Multi-table tournaments (MTTs).
If you are looking to make money fast then this is not the way to do it. But if you are sick of building up a good bankroll and then losing it all then this strategy is for you. What I’ve been trying to do is imagine poker as game rather than something I can make money with. Now I hear you saying, It is a game! It’s poker and that’s true. But what I mean is that if I imagine that what I do in poker has no real world effect then I tend to play better. Never think about the money when you play, it will only make you play worse.
That is where Bankroll strategy is something that you really need to think about if you haven’t already got one in place. I personally was playing poker without any kind of bankrolls strategy for years. This often leads to you making multiple deposits in your poker life which can be quite disheartening. You start to think you can’t be as good as you think you are if you have to keep depositing money and then the game become’s about the money. You’re worried about losing each time you play because of the negative effect it’s having on your bankroll.
Where this may be true for some players, it’s not the case in all. The problem is that poker to at least some degree is about variance and variance is the chance part of the game. It’s to keep playing winning poker when you keep losing due to ‘bad luck’ and not because of your own plays. If you get upset and start worrying about the money that you’re losing then you’re either playing too high stakes or you’re not playing effectively.
It’s important to keep thinking of poker in the long term sense and not get too caught up in the coin flips that you face every day. The best pre-flop hand does not necessarily mean that you will have the best hand after all of the others have came down. If you start to think about poker more on the larger side of things then when you lose a game or two, as long as you know you played your best, you can just chalk it down to variance. If you‘re have a hard time taking bad beats, just remember that these things happen and look at your performance overall.
I would recommend keeping accounts on your poker games if you are going to be taking it seriously. Not only can this help by giving yourself smaller targets to aim for instead of ‘I want to get rich’, it will also help in showing how your performance is in the long run. Because it’s in the long run that skill shows and after thousands of hands if you’re a winning player, it’s going to be because of skill rather than variance or luck.
Along with keeping your accounts, Figure out in your head what games your comfortable playing. I myself use the rules that I can only use 5% of my bankroll for Sit & go’s and 2% for multi table tournaments. The reason it’s such a low percentage is that this helps control and swings variance might cause. You aren’t going to win all the games and keep in mind that a good return on investment (ROI) for Sit and go’s is 20% and you can only expect to cash in multi-table tournaments every 12%.
Another way that helps me deal with losses is to think of games in groups. I myself have just moved up to $5.50 Sit & Go’s but I like to spend a total of around $9 a sitting by also playing a $2.25 STT and a $1.25 MTT. With this in mind I can now comfortably play all three games. If I win the $2 game I gain my $9 that I’ve spent but if I lose it’s not such a big blow to my bankroll. If I come third in the $5 game then I’ve won my money back with a chance to win another $11.50. Then I also have the chance to win a maximum of $22.50 in the MTT but again if I lose $1 isn’t such a blow on my bankroll. I’ll hopefully make some money back in at least one of them each time.
That’s all well & good you may be thinking but what do I do when I lose all three games?
Again, do not worry. It’s a sad sight seeing your bankroll go down after you’ve worked so hard building it up but going on tilt will just make things worse. So keep a clear head and again look at everything in the big picture.
In my rounds I have the opportunity to win a maximum of $54 which equals to a profit of $45.
If I were to do the same again and enter all three games, I’d of spent a total of $18 and there are many ways to now win back the money you just lost and hopefully more. If you carry on losing then you may be having a bad run and it may be the best option to simply turn off your computer and forget about poker for a while.
The plan is to keep a steady rising bankroll with small swings in either direction. Every so often you’ll hopefull place high in a MTT pushing up the bankroll even more so you can play in more expensive games.
I hope the information you’ve read here has been helpful and good luck on the tables.
