Quote:
Originally Posted by Brussels Sprout
This post reminded me of a section of a Dara O'Kearney book on ICM that I was reading the other day:
That's not why big stack players on day 1 usually don't end up making it far. It's mainly because they are just overly aggressive doofs. They will get chips early by running dumb bluff after dumb bluff when players are over folding, but they'll eventually go bust running into a big hand and a good player.
I'll just speak from my personal experience and having had these conversations w/ many of the best players over the years. When I first started playing high stakes MTT's, I couldn't believe how bad the players were. I mean, it was crazy how bad they played, especially deep. I never had this same kind of feeling in HS cash games. I know guys like Doug Polk who have expressed the exact same things. These guys were primarily over folding, and not running any good bluffs. And as I said, this has changed over the last 5+ years, as solvers have improved the games of players across the board.
What that quote from that book misses is that if you do know what you're doing, you can build a stack pretty easily so that you can avoid getting short stacked, and you can apply pressure through the middle and later stages of the tournament. That's typically how I've won or cashed when I've played HS MTT's.
Any ways, was just trying to shed light to OP on why going from MTT's to cash seems so different.