Where to go from here

First post, so please be gentle.

A little background, I've been playing for real money since February of this year. I built my bankroll up from $25 to $2000 through playing all manner of hold-em games and accumulating a lot of bonuses. In July, I started focusing on multi-table tournaments and have had the following results over a 3 1/2 month period: (The percentages are estimates)

Won Party $30 R&A at 12:10am for $7000
Won Party $100 midnight tournament for $9750
Won Poker Stars $100 1:00am tournament for $6400
Third in Party $50 1:00am for $1850
Two more final tables.

My ITM is around 15% and final table is around 8-10%

My total earnings are around $26k or so. I have cashed out $20k leaving my active bankroll at $6k.

With that in mind, where do I go from here. I know when I started playing $100 tournaments, I was WAY out of my bankroll. What is a reasonable bankroll to play $50 and $100 tournaments and not go broke?

What are reasonable ITM and Final table percentages for those buy-ins?? I'm pretty sure I'm on a huge upswing, but want to get other opinions?

How should I go about working on my game?? I don't have a real 'overall goal' ... should I have one? I've read both HOH and lurk at this forum and a few others. Should I play some SNGs (which I don't much care for cause they feel like a crap shoot at the end)??

That's all for now, please let me know your thoughts or flame me as you feel fit. /images/graemlins/tongue.gif

Thanks,
scoobylee

Your bankroll is fine for 50/100$ buyin tournaments if you feel you are on that level of play, which results say you are. I think the least recommended for 100$ buyin is 5000, and thats on the small side. Of course, you could go on a long bad run, and take a big swing on that bankroll, so if you can't handle the possible downswing obviously dont play that high. I think you should be alright either way, but of course I know absolutely nothing about how you play and am just going off of results.

WOW... this is a great run. Congrats!

I think you should be fine with your bankroll to play in the $50 and $100 dollar tourneys. You might even want to try a Super Weekday or one of the large Guarenteed tournies on the weekend for $150 or $200. It really looks like you have the level of play to do well in them.

As for working on your game I find that playing in SnGs has helped my MTT performance. I think they really help you learn how to change gears as you are moving from a full table down to short handed pretty quick and need to be able to adjust to do well in them. This relates to the end of the MTTs when you have less than 100 people left and are often going back and forth between short handed and full table play.

Playing in some short handed tournies also helps. There are short handed SnGs on PStars that are great. I've also played in some large 6 handed MTTs on Ultimate Bet if you have an account there.

Also I find that the heads-up tournaments on Stars have been a great help. Either the SnGs or the MTT ones depending on how much time you have. You play in most MTTs for over 5 hours and the biggest pay jump is from 2nd to 1st, which I think makes heads up play one of the most important parts of the game even if the times you make it this far in an MTT are rare. While I'm thrilled to make it to any final table, there's still a major dissapointment if I don't close it out.

Anytime we want experience in the first few stages of an MTT all you have to do is enter one. I see a lot of posts saying,"I always get to the bubble with a short stack." Playing short handed and heads up force you to get aggressive, which is vital to the later stages of tournament play. I think these are three great ways to work on your game for the parts of MTTs that we don't always get a chance to play in or at least not as often.

Hope this helps. Congrats on the success so far and gl in the future.