Ha, yeah, sorry guys. Had a bunch of stuff going on last couple of weeks. Couple of friends visited who I never see, so I spent a week just hanging out with them mostly. Poker volume has been pretty low, and there's really nothing to report. Should be back to normal now though, and with FTOPS coming up hopefully there'll be stuff happening soon.

Anymore on this? That's nice you got some visitors to take ur mind off the grind for awhile. Now BACK TO WORK, WIN ALL THE MONIES!

Nah, nothing more yet. Should hopefully know this week.

I hate to bother you with this simple question after reading your blog so long but I really have to ask.

What study material did you use to get this far? I have so much time on hands nowadays and I'm really willing to invest alot of it into studying, I'm very motivated but just cant seem to find a fundamental order to become better studying. Of course like most players I have alot of playing poker experience but never really took the time to study.

And believe me I have tried to find a logical order before posting here ^^

I hope you have some time to give me a good answer and If not i'll just keep drooling here

Thanks in advance mate

EDIT: Would like to add that I have a good feeling for game so would you recommend just getting in the fundamentels; Like Math, ICM and then just play, play play and learn my "own" game. And of course still review my own play, others play and watching video's to see where other people excel vs. me

In terms of useful study material, I definitely learned the basics through the 2p2 strategy forums, but once you get to a certain point they're not that useful. I read books like Kill Everyone and Raiser's Edge, I signed up to almost every training site and watched videos by MTT sickos like Assassinato, Timex, and a bunch of others. I actually don't review my own game as much as I should, but I suppose that's because I have my backers sweating me almost always, so I'm usually pretty aware of when I've just made an important mistake as someone will point it out to me.

In terms of a strategy for studying, there's really no secret - you just have to work as hard as you can on each aspect of the game. It seems nonsensical to me to advise anyone to study (for example) ICM before they study hand ranges, or study math before they study theoretical stuff about table dynamics, because every single facet of the game is extremely important. There's nothing that you "don't need to know", because the more you know, the better you get, so why wouldn't you want to know all of it?

The one thing I will say is that I think a lot of MTT regs have terrible awareness of ICM, and the ones that make it most difficult to play with them are the ones that do. I would certainly recommend paying attention to studying ICM, since it's something that has a huge impact on your ROI - I laugh every time I hear someone say "ICM is for nits, I play for the win" or something similar. There is no 'most important thing', but ICM is certainly not as unimportant as some people might think.

That's some real great advice you gave me there. I wasn't planning on excluding anything out of my gameplan but still a great confirmation and some good book tips and video authors.

Thanks alot man. Now I'm just going to study on anything I can, don't feel like I need a logical order as long as I just interpertate everything correctly and use it.

Looking forward to your updates!

i mainly care about ICM when there are 6 or less ppl tbh... when there are 8 or 9 ppl at a bowlcomp FT, i really dont care bc payjumps arent that big like the topheavy payouts.

dont know if this advice is really bad or just my style but you should relate the ICM facts to your BR and the skill over the other players imho.

and most of the time its just called : "**** ICM"

Honestly, I think this is really terrible advice. Sure, it's hard to make a really tight fold when the difference between 9th and 8th is very small, but if you make 100 bad ICM decisions in a year that cost you an average of $10, you've cost yourself $1k. If you play higher stakes and make 50 bad decisions that cost yourself $200 each, you've cost yourself $10k.

Ignoring ICM because the payjumps are small is exactly the same thing as calling an all-in without the correct pot odds because "**** it, let's gamble". Sure, it's hard to keep your focus in those situations, and taking into account your edge in the field is important, but you can't win the tournament if you're not in it, and ICM is just not one of those things that you can just hand-wave away. An ICM mistake is a mistake, just like a bad call is a mistake. There shouldn't be any mistake in your game that you know about but aren't trying to eliminate.

(facepalm)

Today's been a pretty classic day of MTTs. Came 12th in the Night on Stars Turbo on .fr, 37th in the T-Rex, 78th in FTOPS event 2 (freerolling that obv), 22nd in the PartyPoker Major, 8th in the ipoker 109 30k, 42nd in the ipoker Sunday Special, and top 100 in a bunch of other stuff. Great example of why MTTs just aren't fun like 80% of the time.

Still in the Bigger 11 somehow, but if I final table this I'll be up until like 8am, as there's still 136 players left.

I've been away for some time but its great to be back and see you playing even better, I believe!

I will be following again every day!! Cmon Matt!

So guys, with reference to the exciting news I was talking about before, I can now reveal that I am going to be the latest addition to the Tournament Poker Edge team of pros! Very excited to be a part of the team. Sadly this blog will be leaving TwoPlusTwo and moving to TPE soon, but I'll post a full update and link to the new location once everything has been sorted out over the next couple of weeks.

Thanks everyone for your support!

congrats

wow awesome, grats!

but why not blog on TPE and x-Post here?

anyway, grats again and gl with the coaching gig

TPE have requested that I move the blog over there. I'll still try to read this thread in case people have questions etc, but hopefully it'll die a natural death once my TPE blog starts up.

congratulations Matt, but we still want the thread to be alive here

If this is how people are thinking, I'll definitely have a word with TPE about keeping this thread alive and cross-posting.

Yeah, definitely do that. This is a very useful resource and a big part of what makes pgc so cool. It's also very accessible and it'd be shame to have you tucked away in that corner of the Internet. Massive congrats on this though; great work and well deserved.

How's FTOPs gone so far?

Gratz on the TPE thingy! But I aswell would like to see the blog here aswell

Maybe at least they'll let you paste links to your blog posts? A lot of people are reading 2+2 and I don't know if they would go to TPE separately every day to check for updates.

Just had a word with TPE and this blog will now be staying where it is. I will also be posting some of my more detailed updates on TPE, so I will link those where appropriate.

Sweet!

One of my fav threads on 2+2, gotta say ty, gratz, and furthermore gl

grats, but glad to have you here in pgc still