I am currently a student on summer holidays, and am spending it improving my game and planning my poker for the college term. I play at least one live MTT a week, and have played a good few online, but never had a real BR. I'd usually just put in a 10er and see what I could get it, bad tactic I know but I'm actually up money.

Anyway, when college come back I expect to have some nice money made over the summer and want to get a decent BR for the college term, regularly paying MTTs and either moving up the ladder, or simply earning some extra money for myself.

So here's where I need some help.

What should I play: MTTs of course. I would be willing to put a BR of anywhere between $100 - $300. I heard with MTTs that you should have at least 100 buy-ins ??

Which site ? I have played on FT so far, but apparently poker stars has the best MTTs?

What should my goals be? Like how often should I expect to cash? Is there a percentage of tournaments?

Additional free software I should have? Iv seen many threads with people describing villians as 1/345/1234 etc (fantasy numbers), and I assume these were obtained by some sort of software that tracks villians bets or something similar.


I am young and obviously inexperienced but you have to start somewhere and I want to start properly, instead of blowing my money by not planning things out. Also, I play 2-4 tables usually.

Thanks for any advice you guys do have

What experience do you have? What limits have you played?
I started with $5 deposits playing the .10 360 turbos on stars (for the most part)

I like stars MTTs more

Don't focus at all on cashing, but if you want to know you can look up MTT grinders on officialpokerrankings and see what % they cash

Good goals are playing a tournament/day without tilting
Playing a certain # of tournaments a day/week/month
PokerTracker/HoldemManager/PokerCoPilot.
all are paid programs but have free trials, PT's free trial is two months I believe

Try not to be results oriented, focus on playing your best in each and every tournament and the results will come.