Been playing online MTTs for years with varying degrees of volume (although only 1600 tournies in past 4-5 years) but recently been trying to focus on them more again. My ITM % is alright, around 25% average but my FT % is lower around 9% and my event wins % is even more dismal at around 1%. So I feel that I'm doing better getting ITM more often but not laddering up as much as I could be and thus my ROI in many stakes/formats of MTTs is negative.

Obviously there's the usual bad beats and suck outs. The usual "if only my KK had held up there , how much further could I have gone?!."

But in looking more into it I've noticed I'll often do good in early to mid stages of the tourney, sometimes even getting into the top 10 chip stacks in the field. Only to see the stack dwindle. Sure I lose my fair share of 95% favorite to win only to lose on the river, but of course there's got to be things I'm doing wrong in other stages of the tourney, that I can do better, that are leaving me in a bad position stack wise where my tourney life is at risk more than it should be as the field shrinks.

A few things I've noticed that leads to this is going card dead and not really knowing better steal spots or moves to make, hitting a great flop but seeing it's draw heavy with multiple players to act and not being sure enough of my bet sizing to give bad odds to chase esp if half the table then calls along, and getting check raised a little more than I'd like.

Basically how can I better build and maintain a healthy stack especially as the field shrinks so that I'm not limping into the money as much and instead coming into the money with a healthy stack? And what are some ways (or books/videos I can view) to help me better understand moves I should be making to run deeper?

I'm guessing you're playing too tight in the later stages, based on your description. Early on in a tournament a value-oriented approach works well. Later in the tournament stealing blinds becomes more important. I would try to analyze your game and make sure you are not passing up on too many positive $ EV spots.

There are times where ICM forces you to play tight, such as when you are a middle stack on a final table. However the natural tendency is to over value our tournament life when we run deep.

Thank you. This does make sense, reading this , yeah i can see myself sometimes overvaluing staying in the tourney versus making a correct play in late position to steal blinds/antes or even a looser call. The ICM point at final table is interesting, I've always naturally let others battle it out if I'm a middle stack at a final table but nice to know there's math theory behind that approach.

I suppose maybe one area I can look to improve is stealing more in late position when limped or folded to me.

You might be too risk averse when approaching the money bubble or other significant pay jumps or bubbles.

I found for myself I used to tighten up far too much with my above average stack as we neared the money and the average stack was significantly shorter than mine. I would be looking for reasons to fold hands (wanting to preserve chips, fearing shoves from short stacks behind, a 20bb stack has already opened from early position and thus must be strong, etc) rather than looking for reasons to take initiative and apply pressure.

It's amazing what can happy when you get aggressive and throw caution to the wind. We can pick up countless blinds which will easily offset the times we do get shoved on and need to fold. Not to mention there's no reason we can't have a monster and call off some shoves, which may even be pretty wide as they think we are opening too much. So we can win blinds, win all ins with our monsters and even get lucky in some races when we aren't favourites but had to call shoves due to correct pot odds. It can have a snowball effect where the bigger our stack gets in these situations, the easier it becomes to collect chips and the harder it becomes to slow us down.

And the worst case scenario? We bust and don't win the tournament, which is going to happen almost all the time anyway. For me that was a big realization that wether we like it or not, we are not going to win the tournament almost all the time, so why not give ourself the greatest chance of actually winning? Rather than trying to creep into money and small jumps, all but killing off our chance of a really deep run.

I like to think of a tournament like it's a car race. Knowing at which times to change gears up or down is equally as important as the actual car we are driving.

By the way I still don't do any of this as much as I need to, but I know should 😂

So to sum up I guess I am saying, if you have a healthy stack and approaching the money, open wider, 3 bet more, c bet more and barrell off more turns and rivers. Remember if you are playing against shorter stacks who are likely to be wanting to cash, they need to play pretty honest against you, so if they play back at you with real intent, you can easily fold and move right along to the next spot. The pots picked up from bullying will outweigh the times we need to fold when played back at.

Historically I would love making the money, and I think it was an ego thing. I would feel good cashing like I had achieved something but in doing so I was giving up chances to have a big score.

Not much actual specific advice here but more of a philosophy thing, hope it helps.

Non showdown winnings is the key - ability to steal chips without having to make a hand. As others have said you need to put pressure on the shorter stacks and think outside the box a little postflop - I would play less tables and really focus on improving your game. This aggression will allow you to close tournaments late - keep in mind field size can create insane variance. When I played MTTs for a living I would play a lot of fringe sites with small fields - kept variance low as my ABI was 120. I took few shots in 1k+ fields but those were rare. In the end though be honest with yourself - when you're playing against people are you better than them or are they better than you. Only way to improve.

Thank you all. I began to try to take approaches to be a bit more aggressive in picking up blinds and pots and noticed an almost immediate improvement. Tried some more smaller field tournies on a smaller site to see how that impacts things. Also hit the books some more to better understand why , when, and how to do so.

How often we reach the final table or win is totally dependent on field size. So while ITM is a relevant parameter to track, the other numbers are completely meaningless, and you should mainly focus on your ROI. If thats negative, thats obviously not good. But if you only play 300-400 MTTs per year, your sample is not big enough to break results down on stakes or formats. Subsamples like 100-200 MTTs will be completely dominated by variance, and you are not getting any relevant information by looking at them. If you want success in online MTTs, you need to study and improve your game, and you also need to play quite a bit more, than you do. Maybe you dont have time for slow MTTs on working days, but then play some turbos or SnGs to get more volume in.

Top X% finishes--as opposed to Top Y (like top 3 or whatever) or FTs or Win%-- is a much better metric because:

1. Pick a reasonable value for X--say 5%--and they'll converge decently quickly. You'd only need >=20 entrants for a given event to add to your exposure base.
2. Top X% is invariant to field size.
3. Top X% is invariant to prize pool (which is also a function of field size but also buy-in amount)

An actuarial approach (and what I'm pretty sure is the best approach) would be: take your exposure (your volume i.e. the count of how many events you've played) and multiply by (X/100). That's your expected # of finishes at or above that threshold. Compare to your actual results. Is your actual/expected ratio greater than 100%?

For reference I've been getting around 200% for both X=10% and X=5%. In other words, a top 10% finish every 5 events or so and a top 5% finish every 10 events or so. If you told me I could make a Faustian bargain--sustain those results but in exchange never again penetrate beyond the 95th percentile of a field--I'd accept it immediately.

1600 events is a pretty good sample size and could very well be fully credible if you're looking at metrics which are invariant to buy-in and field size.

1600 is NOT a good sample size if you're preoccupied with ROI. If I played 1,600 events with an ABI=$100 and won $60k, then bricked six straight WSOPMEs, am I really a breakeven player? So ROI, the traditional metric, just really isn't very good especially if you want to take shots at very high BI stuff--ROI is sensitive to volatility inherent in the vicissitudes of the game, and also volatility in BI amounts attempted.

Really, though, the best way to gauge any competitor's technical skills is the turn the game into a math exam. There are really only three sources of edge--the poker value chain really only has three components:

1. Skill in making risky assumptions. (this is a technical skill)
2. Skill in computing optimal solutions in light of those risky assumptions (this is a technical skill)
3. Competitiveness--affecting both on- and off-table behaviors which maximize value. (this is a non-technical skill and to be honest probably can't be taught)

If you really want to test your technical skills, give yourself time to work through a few hundred game trees away from the table, in a controlled setting, but under normal time pressure. Compare your computed strategies with the equilibria. This tests how well you are able to hold ranges in your visual-spatial and auditory working memory, and it tests how well you're able to transfer that into a strategy computation. Elite players should be somewhere around 90%-100% accurate (i.e. losing no EV compared to equilibrium) in all possible spots including the exotics like 4b pots and BvB. This at least gives you an idea at how good you are at #2--determining how good you are at making accurate assumptions and determing how good you are at being at being a really badass competitor are different beasts.

And unless you're using the right metrics, looking at high-level results is counterintuitively probably the worst way to actually measure technical skill level. Competitiveness is a different story.

This is indeed a good metric, but is there any simple way to get this number from your tracker or from 3-party sources like Sharkscope? The advantage of ROI is, its very easy to calculate. But as you say, if you play a wide span of buyins, both average ROI and total ROI are easily skewed to the point, where they become meaningless. Having crushed 1$ tournaments dont help much, if you cant beat higher buyins, and losing all your winnings on "shots" is poor bankroll management but does not mean, you are not a winning player.

Doubt it. You should be keeping your own results in a spreadsheet, at least session-by session with relevant information including:

-Number of events
-Number of buy-ins
-Total $ Volume
-Total win/loss
-Average field size
-Count of TopX% finishes

Top 5% is a useful stat
Top 10% or top 12% is close to itm% if you’re regularly playing large field mtts, and may be artificially high if you regularly creep into $ with short stacks

So top5/top10 as a measure of late stages skill, would also be a useful stat

FWIW, SharkScope does have some useful stats here. They have both "Average ROI" vs. "Total ROI": Total ROI is just overall cashes over buyins; average ROI averages the ROI of each individual tournament you enter. (So, if, say, you entered nine $10 tournaments and won $100 in each, then bought into a $1000 tournament and didn't cash, your Total ROI would be negative, but your Average ROI would be 900%, if I'm right about how they calculate that.)

And they also break down finishes by percentile-- "late finishes" measures top 10% of the field, for example-- although if you want something more granular than what they offer you'll have to calculate that yourself.

(Admittedly, some of their stats aren't exactly accurate-- for example, everyone who makes it through a day-1 flight on ACR is technically considered to finish "first" by the site, so I think that will show up in your "wins" stat even though that's not really "winning a tournament" in any sense of the word.)

I would't rely on anyone or anything to collect my performace data other than myself

You think Sharkscope is making up stats?

You say it as if I'm suggest there's something nefarious going on.

No I don't think they're "making up stats" but I know for a fact there's tons of bad data on there. For example, a friend of mine doesn't even have their largest scoops reflected on Sharkscope.

It takes literally 2 minutes after your session to collate your results into a spreadsheet. Relying any someone or something else to do that for you is just terrible enterprise risk management.

I played a two day tournament with multiple legs that I made a deep run in. Everyone who qualified for day 2 cashed and was paid the min cash after that leg was done, but before day 2 began.
Sharkscope totally misreported my gain in that tournament, and didn't give me any credit for the extra cash I made in day 2. If you clicked on the tournament, you could easily tell it was wrong, as it had me winning just over the buy-in despite showing me placing in the top 100 with over 8000 runners.

But Sharkscope appears to be accurate with respect to all my single day MTTs.

Never had that issue with SS over about a 7 year period. Either way in theory even if they're missing some portion of cashes, provided they're not missing big scores you can still pull data that's relevant.

I do have trouble tracking individual tourneys after a high volume session (and because PT4 for some reason really sucks at accurately collecting ACR tourney data). But I always at least track my session results myself.

The one that's stuck for me now is from one of the days ACR crashed; I was pretty deep in a tournament, enough to get a four-figure score after the chop, but that's not showing up in my Sharkscope results at all.

Missed tournaments can be reported to the sharkscope team via e-mail or submitted on the website. You just need the Tournament ID which you can find in the stars lobby for example...

I rarely have any issues with sharkscope. They are doing a good job IMO

I did report that one when it happened (it was early July) and followed up on them recently fwiw. Still didn't have the information.

Stack more donks in early and middle game.