A little over halfway thru the FTOPs schedule, I'm 0 for 3 in events.  After my miraculous minor-MTT win, Mrs. Fly seems to think I'm going to start winning every other tournament I enter.  Um...  It doesn't quite work that way.  So I had to 'splain:  The three events I entered had an average field of 3,000 players.  So even if I was awesome (and I'm not), realistically I can't expect to win more than one in 1,500 of these.  Or final table more than one in 167 of these.  Or cash in more than 20% of these.  That's because 100% is pretty much what a very good ROI is in tournaments.  That's a lot of tournament futility, and failure is waaay more common than success.

This is in stark contrast to cash games, where a good player has 70+% winning sessions.  So when you take a winning cash game player and throw him into the world of MTTs, it's a rude awakening and can be super-frustrating.  As a good player, you expect to make $100-200+ per hour.  When you play a tournament, you not only have to fork over the $100+ entry fee, you lose one of your multitabling tables for a few hours and you're probably not going to cash.  Not to mention that unless you win, you're usually going to have a brutal exit that will stay with you for a while.  That's a difficult thing for a winning cash game player to swallow.

Unfortunately for us as professional poker players, the general public measures poker "success" with MTT wins and in particular, WSOP bracelets.  If you want to treat poker like a business, you need to balance the money-making potential of cash games with the commercial potential of winning a major MTT (later post).

Two more basic MTT tips:

* Play at some short-stack-infested tables (shallow, cap, etc).  You may be saying, "WTF?!?  DoubleFly has lost his mind!"  Do this without auto-reloading and try to last as long as possible - that is, don't 3bet shove unless you have to (but have a high 3bet).  Get the feel for playing high-frequency small-ball poker.  The stage where you have 10-35 big blinds is what's going to see you thru to cashing.  If you aren't cashing at least 15% of your events, you are either unlucky or have some leaks in your middle game (or both).

* Play some STTs (sit-n-goes).  Tournament payouts (especially for online tournaments) are incredibly skewed - especially at the final table.  First place is 12-15 TIMES as much ninth place.  It makes no sense to enter a bunch of MTTs when you don't have to skill set to go all the way when you eventually final table.

A little training goes a long way (hopefully).