so i dabble in cash games all poker really. so far i'm really liking mtt. i'm playing freeroll variant on this site america cardroom. they run an on demand mtt that pays 10 plouaces 24/7. so you can definitely build a bankroll by doing them although they're freerolls so it's tough.

so far i'm 0/9 as for cashing. closest i came so far was 45th place. how many mtts is normal before landing a cash? also i know in freeroll players play careless and it feels more like bingo at times but i've noticed as you get closer to cashing players start playing more cautious and not as donkish.

what advice for cashing? not burning on out? could a good mtt player build a bankroll relatively quickly doing this?

I don't think you could build a bank roll "quickly" by playing freerolls but the caliber of player is definitely worse than real money tournaments so a good, solid player could cash more than the normal freeroll players.
My advice would be to play a solid, tight abc style game. Don't get fancy and try to outplay players because a majority of the time it'll probably blow up in your face. Try and play solid hands in position and don't get attached to trouble hands (weak aces, qj, kj) when you make top pair.

question about mtt winrate. in say a 400 average player pool top 10 places paid how often would a good mtt player be able to cash 1/20 games?

To be honest with you, I'm not really sure what a players winrate should be. But there's probably someone here who's more math based than me. Hopefully they'll chime in.

I would be more concerned with making the correct plays while playing, the winrate will come after that. Of course variance is a part of the game so just because you make the correct play doesn't necessarily mean you will win, but it's a great start.

That's an easy way to think about it. If you play MTTs that pay 5% of the field, then you should be cashing more than 5% (otherwise you're just cashing at the rate of chance). However, tourney players don't typically think in terms of cash rate, they think in terms of ROI because at the end of the day what matters is how much money you make not how often you cash.

Johnathan Little put a number on this. He thinks that a serious player should be cashing between 8% and 16% of the time. Less than 8% and you aren't winning enough to make a a profit. More than 16% and you're not taking enough risks to get yourself to the final table with a big stack.

I'm not sure how the pay jumps work for freerolls, but for MTTs in general good players usually don't make their money from a lot of small cashes. They make it from a few very large cashes, which is the point Little was making.

For example, one year Vanessa Rousso won around $1 million if I remember correctly. What I do remember for sure is that $300,000 of that was from one big cash (a WPT final table.)

Another example: Chris Ferguson had a WPT season where he only cashed twice, but they were both final tables--which means they were both six-figure cashes.

Most of the good MTT players don't think about how they do in a week or a month. They take risks to build a big stack and play for first place. They hope to do well with a few big cashes over over hundreds of tournaments (for many live players), thousands of hands, or a year.

You're just playing freerolls to get a stake to play $1 online tournaments or whatever so your situation is a little different, but keep the above in mind in your future playing.

That's why ROI is the better indicator of success. A few deep finishes will result in a better ROI than twice as many min-cashes.

so far i'm 0/20 but i've busted out between the range of 15-45 players five times now. usually there's at least 700 but i've been switching to only playing after 10pm because traffic dies down and you only get about 300-500 players in there. although i can say late at night the players are much better not stacking off with junk all-in five ways etc.

it just sucks that it only plays 10 places so hard once you get down to 100 ICM or w/e people are basically push folding trying to pick their spots and i can never get in the money because i stack off and don't hold up or just dominated for instance 9bb left shove c/o with ATo get snap called by AA. just can't run good at that final stage of tournament right before the money although i'm getting more consistent at getting to that stage of the tournament.

well since this thread kinda picked up what's my most reasonable line for actually bankrolling? shipping one of these and putting it on a cash table? being patient win quite a few of these to where i actually have multiple BI's for something? or just win and take shots at the .55 mtt?

When you're just starting it seems like 20 tournaments are a lot, but there are multitabling pros that play 10 or more in one day. Twenty really is a very small sample size.

I mentioned a few posts above that Little says you should be cashing between 8% and 16% of the time to make money playing MTTs. When you think about it that way, it's obvious that 20 tournaments isn't enough to have any idea how you're doing. If you are a good player (and it sounds like you know enough to have an edge over a freeroll player pool) and you play more than 100 freerolls you'll probably have some cashes in there. You might cash tomorrow, or you might not cash for a month, then get 3 cashes the next month, but as your sample size grows, your winnings will come closer and closer to representing your level of skill.

If you play one freeroll a day for a year (sample size of 365 or 366) you'll probably have enough cashes to play a $1 SNG (or whatever game you decide to play with real money) several times during that year.

I know that this is an old post, but I need to make a correction and give credit where it is due. Little didn't just dream up those 8% and 16% numbers. They are based on a Daniel Negreanu study of World Poker Tour tournament results.

The WPT pays out about 12.5% of entrants (based on my examination of payouts in a very limited sample size). I don't think we can use the same ITM rates for a tournament, like OP's, that pays out 2.5%. Furthermore, % paid is not sufficient to determine how often you need to get paid to be profitable. The structure of those payouts matters as well.