Everyone knows tournaments are soft. I've heard on a few occasions that they're the more profitable route or the way to have a shot at a ridiculous score. However I don't understand. Most of the tournaments I play seem to have a 25 to 40x for first. Given the fact that you don't get **** unless you pretty much win, Wouldn't that mean you need to do a little worse than a win or so every 25 to 40 buy ins to show a little profit?

Maybe im not playing big enough tournaments with enough people? Maybe I need to improve cause I should be able to win more than that? Seems weird to me though I must have played hundreds of tournaments already, few second places but no wins besides sit n go. Seems like its a good way to bleed money and then break even or worse every couple months if you win one. Maybe if it was more like 250x I could see it, but 30 to 40x to beat over a hundred people seems like a carnival game. Why isn't cash better?

If you are a winning player, of course cash is a better way to maintain consistent income. However, you realistically cannot make more than $60-70k a year playing a $500-$1,000 buy-in game (2 5). You will also be hard pressed ot make more than $30-40k playing a $100-$300 buy-in game (1 2).

On another hand, you have a shot at a $200k-300k score in a single $500-$600 tournament if you manage to play and run great for a couple days in a row (https://pokerdb.thehendonmob.com/event.php?a=r&n=71153)

Also, if you are a fish playing fundamentally bad poker - you have no shot of having a winning or even break-even year in 2 5. However, you can have a couple good runs and bink something in the tournament world.

This is the appeal. Decide what your motivations for playing poker are and choose your games accordingly.

Okay, sounds like I need to think about it. Also, if a $500 dollar tourney could realistically pay 200k. That means the 3am tournaments im playing aren't cutting it cause they're nowhere near paying out that much for first. Maybe i'll aim for the prime time evening and day tournaments to increase the guarantee. I think i'll try and work some cash in there a little more, i'm interested in learning both strategies and it sounds like strictly tournaments aren't for me. Thanks for the response. Thankful for this forum.

That's possible yet rare. You'd expect normally a 20-30k pay day for a 500 one on avg (live) i'd say. Binking a tournament is all unicorn and rainbow but it's a total mind **** from time to time and you gotta have a lot of confidence perseverance and the will to thrive. Have fun!

That's good to hear because that's what I've been trying to tell myself. "tournaments variance is ****ed." But like you said.. it gets hard to keep believing that, my mind starts racing about just burning away my bankroll.. and then hitting just to break even again. Just gonna work on my game and keep playing both tournaments and cash, try and keep my head down and work on the strategy stuff I suppose. Thanks for all the responses it means a lot.

The main mistake most tournament players do is just randomly playing any tournament they can find and once they increased their bankroll they climb the stakes even they make less money or the same amount of money there.

Often its not even necessary to play tournaments with $100+ buy-ins or what first place gets. Its all about the average amount of money you make at these tournaments.

If you for example play a $ 100 tournament and beat it with a ROI of 10%, you would make the same amount of money longterm as you would make with a $10 tournament which you beat with a 100%, but you will have much less variance.

What I want to say its all abount game selection. For example tournaments which dont have sattelites are usually a lot less profitable than tournaments with the same buy in which have sattelites. There are some more factors which should be included in game selection.

If you have sharkscope premium you can create a group of regular mtt players till you have a big sample for each tournament and then you will get a rough idea of how profitable each tournament is and start creating your schedule from there.

The us players often don't have the luxury of playing online tourneys and the small/micro buy in ones live are usually heavily raked.

Thanks for the full paragraph that's whats up. Similar to the conclusion I've come to from these posts and my own thinking, its about game selection.You've made me realize that game selection goes way beyond playing the evening tournaments instead of the 3am ones lol. Also learning that poker soft wares are ****ing everywhere, this shark scope sounds like an important one to have though. I know game selection can be really profitable, I've been kind of avoiding the idea of it. However im realizing that it might be time to dive in. I'll check out shark scope for sure thanks again.

I'll keep a better eye on the rake moving forward, the tourneys I play are generally ten percent rake. 10+1, 100+10, etc. I played a live tourney at my casino once, i'll have to check my gram for the photo of the ticket... looks like its the same as online, 100+10. Side note: I paid for some kind of chip increase at the time but I don't see it on the ticket and I don't really remember how much it was. I don't know specifics on that kind of thing but I did some math and basically ran it like pot odds. Was less than 10% of the buy in for 10% of chips so I said **** it and snagged em up. Does anyone know if I should be doing it differently or if that's a good way to do it? Wouldn't be surprised if icm has some ****ed up way of changing the values lol im still new to this.

Anyways, what do you guys think of those rake structures? (don't mind the chip increase rant if you don't want) I plan on heading to that casino more to play tournaments once I get my license in a couple days. Seems like all the tournaments I have access to are 10% rake across the board.

Personally I play tournaments even if they are not profitable. I'm focused on the skills I learn and can apply rather than the $ won or lost.