I have been playing poker recreationally for about a decade but never had time to play online tournaments because they take too much time and I was working a job that required me to work 75+ hours a week including weekends. I recently left that job and so for the past two weeks I opened an account at America's Cardroom and found that I am pretty decent at tournaments. My results so far:

$20k GTD $100 buy in - 3rd place for $2,201.50
$500 GTD $15 buy in - 1st place for $182
$2k GTD $50 buy in - 2nd place for $369
$4k GTD KO $100 buy in - 1st place for $1,000 + $100 for 10 KOs
$2k GTD $50 buy in - 3rd place for $286
$2k GTD $40 buy in - 2nd place for $420
$3k GTD $30 buy in - 1st place for $1,005

And then there are 20 other tourneys where I finished ITM. All of this was in the past 8 days so I have been playing quite a bit.

I am terrible at cash games. Not sure why but I play with patience in tourneys but at cash games I play loose passive and am not a winning player at stakes above $0.25/$0.50.

I know I can improve but how? In some of the ITM finishes I got hit with some really bad beats. Like just earlier I was the final 16 in a $15k GTD tourney and in 7th place and the chip leader was playing really loose (also confirmed with the HUD display stats) so I had KhJh on a 69J flop. I raised pre-flop and he 3 bet me so i called and the flop shows up. I bet half pot and he called. The turn is a 2 or a blank and my remaining chip stack was about 1/3 of the pot size and the chip leader bets so i had to call for an all-in. He flips over a 93 unsuited and I was thrilled. And then the dreaded river was a 3 and the villain beats me with a 2 pair. It seems as if variance / bad luck has been crushing me.

I need some help and would like to know what I can do to improve. I've read some books and reviewed my old hands but I just feel like I've reached a plateau. Also, for some reason I've become more tight and nitty because I realized that some players will play any two hands to try to get lucky and wound up crushing me like this.

I'm losing confidence in my play now. What do you guys suggest? One thing I thought about was entering tournaments with higher buy in costs so that the crazy donks will think twice about making crazy moves when more money is on the line.

Please give me some suggestions. I also tried to practice via freerolls but they are useless because the players shove with anything and I've had my pocket aces or KK cracked by hands like 82 or 72 more than I can remember.

Help! How do I get better and make more final tables? I am sick and tired of this routine where midway in most tournaments I am ranked in the top 5 and then for more than half of the tournaments I lose my stack to donks and their crazy plays. It always seems as if I am getting sucked out on and it's driving me mad.

Thanks,
zjpoker

You're not doing anything wrong except getting grumpy about a fact of life.

Bad beats are part of life. They ensure that the guy with 93o keeps coming back without adjusting his loose/sloppy style. Over the long run, you win against such opponents. Your own results at the start of your post attest to this.

In the short run, people sometimes hit five-outers on the river. If you're playing disciplined poker and your opponents aren't, most of the times you bust out or get decimated, it will be because of a bad beat. That's because you're seldom getting your chips in the middle with the worst of it. You're usually the favorite, but luck will knock you down every now and then. Iif you're counting on winning those hands every time, that's just not how it works. Every now and then, the underdog draws out on you.

+1

I was just ruminating on this the other day. Had a bad beat at a final table leaving me out as bubble boy. I had flopped a set of 7s on AJ7 board with two hearts. I bet 2/3 pot, which was about 20% of my stack and villain called. Turn is King of diamonds, which I view as a perfect card, since it hits a lot of villain's two-pair range (AK, KJ, K7) and is a great card for him to try to bluff me on, and he only has QT if they are both hearts. I bet, he shoved, I called confidently, and he turned over QT. I was knocked out, no cash, and fumed about it. The next day driving to work I really thought about it and realized that if I knew what his hand was on the flop I would say that I want him to make that call 100% of the time. I'm a huge favorite and he's drawing to 4 outs. Unless he hits the King on the turn, I'm golden. If he whiffs the turn he probably gives up, but if he hits a queen or ten maybe he sticks around and stacks off more chips to me. So, if I play that same hand 100 times I'm winning way more than I'm losing. Every once in a while he's going to hit his 4-outer and beat me (like this one), but I can't let myself get upset about that. I got it in good and I can't get away from it (still have 10 outs on the river), so I did nothing wrong and would play it the same again the next time.

Moral -- learn to roll with the bad beats and play the "long" game where in the long run the probabilities will play out in your favor if you continue to get it in good. It looks like you're doing fine -- don't expect to win every time and don't expect to win 100% of the time when you are an 80% favorite -- 20% of the time the other guy is going to suck out on you.

As far as I can see, the one thing you'r doing is focusing to much on the neg. outcome.

thanks for the replies guys. i am running bad right now. my pocket aces got crushed 3x today, once by a donk who shoved with a Qd3h in a $60k GTD tourney. i was chip leader ITM and this guy put me in last place and i tried to stay patient but was about to get blinded out so i had to shove with garbage and funny enough i shoved with a T8o and got knocked out by a T9o. sigh.

perhaps this is variance. one thing i am not familiar with is all of this new poker theory. i was a math major and work in finance so i know combinatorics and pot odds, but when i read other postings about fold equity and such I am lost. anyone recommend any good books or resources so i can learn about this stuff before i find a new job? i decided i want to make poker a side income type thing and want to make sure i'm not playing a 2007 style (when i started poker) in 2017.

also, has anyone noticed that the poker tables often freeze in America's Cardroom? I swear that the game has frozen on me several times when i had a premium hand (AA, KK, QQ, TT, AK, etc.) I emailed ACR about this and told them this happened several times during tourneys when I was in late ITM stages and they have not responded. I don't have a loud enough voice in this community to get ACR to do anything since they can simply ignore me and i have no recourse. any suggestions? I can't say for sure how much this cost me in terms of potential additional earnings but in terms of buy-ins it was definitely a few hundred worth of buy ins.

Thanks all!

zjpoker, welcome to the forums and welcome to the beautiful mess that are mtt tournaments! :-)

I have no credentials to judge your play level, but you have to let sink in the fact that in order to win tournaments, even if you're the best player in there, you need to get insanely lucky. Poker is a game of small edges and luck is a major factor short term.

Most posters on this forum have experienced the type of bad beats you are describing so often that they cannot count. You also seem to fall into the trap of thinking backwards when it comes to crazy fish players. You actually want them there and you want them to make crazy bad plays. Sure you will suffer a lot of bad beats. But having EV+ spots is what you should be looking for and be happy about.
The only thing I can give you on this is that some players are so bad that they are really hard to read. But GTO-style play, adapted to these guys, is your friend.

Your results didn't seem that bad overall! This is encouraging!
But beware that today's game is a lot more challenging than a few years back. Not having a good grasp of fold equity, of icm and other factors is a big disadvantage and something a lot of other players at these tables will know about, albeit not well or not appied well.

The trend when it comes to learning poker are video training sites (refer to these forums), but I am still a fan of the books (refer to these forums). Everyone has his own preferences when it comes to learning.