Quote:
Originally Posted by Darth_Maul
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.