If I'm a MTT player

with a bankroll of $635 dollars what type of tournaments should I play? Is a $10 tourney too much?

Stick to $3 and $5?

[Kaeser]

I like to keep 50-100 buy-ins for the tourneys I play. If I were you I'd play the 5's and take a few shots at the 10's when your feeling good. That might be a little conservative but you can't go wrong being safe.

[pzhon]

[ QUOTE ]
with a bankroll of $635 dollars what type of tournaments should I play? Is a $10 tourney too much?

Stick to $3 and $5?

[/ QUOTE ]
If you are a losing player, you can burn through any amount eventually.

If you are a winning player, the bankroll you need depends on how much you win (which is hard to determine), your standard deviation (which depends on the size of the tournaments you enter), and your risk tolerance.

In general, the bankroll you need is c * SD^2/WR. This applies elsewhere, too. c depends on your risk tolerance and ability to move down if you hit a bad streak; most people seem to prefer a value of c between 2 and 4. SD is your standard deviation. WR is your win rate.

The standard deviation of a multitable tournament is sensitive to the number of players. Larger tournaments come with larger standard deviations. I just analyzed three tournaments on UltimateBet, a 144 player $20+2 tournament paying 20 places, a 254 player $10+1 tournament paying 30 places, and a 719 player $5+0.50 tournament paying 80 places. The standard deviations, assuming equal distributions of places, were 3.9 buyins, 5.0 buyins, and 7.4 buyins, respectively. Larger tournaments have larger standard deviations due to the concentration of prizes at the final table.

Winning players should experience higher standard deciations because they will reach the final table more frequently. You need to use a higher SD in the bankroll formula if you have a high win rate, but I'm not sure what the increase is, and it depends on your playing style.

Most MTT forum regulars assume the ROI is lower than 100%. I believe it should be higher for experts in low buy-in tournaments, but it is hard to collect enough data. If you are new to tournaments, you should assume that your ROI is much lower.