I feel honored, but I am just a passive reader
Good luck on your journey tho
Curious btw. Normally you take 30-50 BI in cash games, play and track 100k hands on a specific limit to avoid results being distorted by too much variance (up and down) and if you beat the limit for say 5-7bb/100 or more then you move up to the next limit. The starting limit you choose based on available BR and skill.
Why do you not choose that route ?
(btw most sites give the opportunity to download hand hkstories which you can then import into a tracking program lile holdem manager,poker tracker or hand2note.
The reason why people advocate for that many buy ins is that poker naturally has an enourmous amout of variance, so even the best players in the world are going to go through periods where they lose many buy ins vs way weaker or recreational players. The amount of buy ins helps to play a limit consitently without being at the risk of going broke or having to move down too much.
In tournaments its the same but even more extreme. If you check the graphs of sharkscope from the best players you are going to see that the break even or lose for 1000 tournaments or more regularly -granted thats mostly for very large size tournaments). If you only play small field tourneys the variance is gonna be way less but its still gonna be there.
A good ROI in mtts is 30%, which is however very high already and only the best achieve that.
A good sample size in small field tourney should be around 2000 games. In big firlds its around 5000 games. Zhe number is that high because tourneys have more variance than cash. To give you an idication, pros play around 50ish tourneys/day bjt just start playing many tables at once, it takes a lot of time to get there, so give yourself time
Those numbers should give you a rough indication of what variance is like, what a good path to move through cash game stales is and the variance in the game/why people use so many buy ins.
Wish you all the best my friend!