I'm a 50/100NL grinder just like the rest of you. Sometimes though, I wish I played MTTs, so I can experience that huge rush of an amazing win that doubles your bankroll. Instead, I'm left grinding out the cash games for some big blinds per hundred hands vs nits and shortstackers. I feel like MTTs get soo many more donktards because tourneys naturally attract the idiots who saw it one on TV.

****, man. I want to be sent to the ****ing bahamas to play ****ing poker.

I know I know, the swings are more brutal, and I can imagine its a much more frustrating game to play than cash. But sometimes I get jealous. Anybody like me? Anybody have any words of wisdom?


(On a somewhat related note, do you think learning and building yourself as a poker player is better done via cash games or via MTTs. I would imagine cash games, but maybe thats just my opinion.)

haha I loled

my roommate is an mtt grinder and I'm not jealous at all, you start a session and you can run like ****, but your stuck to the computer for 6 more hours cuz your going deep in a $3 rebuy that you lasted for one hour past the rebuy period and now you are playing when you don't want to for 6 hours, for $18.

no thx, I'll stick to cash and set my own hours and quit when I want tyvm.

Dude, I used to be an MTT grinder ($5-$10) and let me tell you, don't be jealous. The swings will make you cry. I almost busted my whole roll in one month, I promised when I hit a nice score I would learn cash and stick to it and only play MTTs for recreation. It happened, I haven't looked back since. My advice would be, if your a winning player at the cash games, keep it up...if you want the rush of going for a huge score, play some big MTTs on the side for fun.

The rush dies really fast. I remember winning a 180 or something and not feeling anything. And the weird thing is the deeper you go the worse you feel when you get knocked out. So it got to the stage where if I won I didn't care, and if I finished 2nd it was the worst possible result.

Tournaments are great b/c an average player can make more money than one can in cash. But they suck because of the mind numbing breakeven/losing stretches. I laugh when I listen to cash players complain about a bad session or week. Try going thru that for 3-4 months. But the main reason I quit tournies is that they're life killers. You have to commit 4-8 hours to start a session. I can't tell you how many times I loaded up my tables and a friend would phone wanting to do something. And you can't. But then 2 hours later your out of everything. Or you get eliminated from them all but 1 which you just seem to be surviving in. So you're 1-tabling 'til 3 AM.

Nope, not the only one.

Reading about sick scores in MTTs makes me jealous as hell. *shrug*

Play both?

Its not that hard to have one or two MTTs running while playing a cash session.

In other news, running like sh*t in MTTs this year. FML.

I've had a 54k score, but a 45k downswing leading up to it.

I wouldn't suggest just playing big ones, because even though donkaments are easy you aren't going to be as good at them as you think you are especially since most online donkaments are so shortstacked when it matters most. I would try to play them almost for one or two months at least, then when you get pissed off at them revert to only playing the bigger ones that youre rolled for and filling up with however many cash tables. The learning curve will be pretty fast if you can beat ssnl...I started there and had a good amount of early success though I did run pretty good in the beginning

The bad beats must be a lot more frustrating in tournaments I guess.

Cash players are allowed to play PCA, fwiw

Lolollollol, f**king 9 man sng's:





Hahahaha, NEVER AGAIN!!!!

I cash and have not looked back since i quit sng's about 3 months ago.

my room mate came like 5th in a pretty big tourney the other day. i was jealous for like 5 minutes then i played a tourney and busted with AA vs QQ and remember how much i hate toruneys.

MTTs are nice in that once you register for your tournaments for the day, you are committed to them and you are guaranteed to put your target amount of volume in for the day. This can also be an inconvenience, as it forces you to have large blocks of time open on your schedule to play poker, but I wish I could do this for cash.

So what are good ROIs for tournaments? My impression was that tournaments were mainly done for fun and recognition in the poker community. Wasn't the first WSOP just a gimmick to lure people into the cash games? Now the internet has changed that since you can multitable. I think the mindset of busting in a tournament is the same as being stacked in a cash game. You get it back in the the long run.

now that I think about it, tournaments are also probably more difficult. You have the changing blinds and a stack that is relatively shrinking. No table selection. If a villain doesn't let you at his blinds, then you're stuck. You have to learn to play deep stacked as well as short stacked. And the time commitment just sucks.

I'm not sure how the hourly rates in MTT compare to cash. They might be comparable if you can do things like 24table MTTs. I think Joe Cada plays like something in the neighborhood of 100 tournaments a day. Just a slightly different game, I guess. I personally like cash a lot more. Having the 100bbs just gives you so much more in what you can do. Plus it's nice not to be confined in a tournament for 12 hours. It just gets to be such a drag. (not that I would know. I never go that deep)

I do think SnGs are fun, though. I do think the rising blinds are cool as well as the shrinking table. I play the full tilt matrix tournaments a good amount if I want to play for cheap. Those can be wild if you go deep on all four tables. And you aren't stuck playing forever.

But that's just for a change of pace. I love cash.