Is patience the key?

I'm about to start playing a lot of MTT after reading through Dan Harrington's two excellent NL Hold'em Tournament books a few times.

I'm sure you can undergo slumps with coin flips and bad beats near the bubble.

Is patience the thing you have to tell yourself to be a succesful MTT?

When do you start to panic and say, "maybe I'm not made for this?" if you miss cashing 10 straight times.

Just looking for some insight as I switch from cash games to tournies.

[mts]

what do you mean by patience? Like you arnt getting any playable hands and decide to play a shitty hand because its been awhile?

[betgo]

You have to be patient to play any kind of poker, waiting for good cards and good situations.

In tournaments, you have to be patient about winning, because only 2-5% of the players in a particular tournament make the serious money.

Late in the tournament, when you are short stacked, you have to be very impatient and fearless.

[Potowame]

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When do you start to panic and say, "maybe I'm not made for this?" if you miss cashing 10 straight times.



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You will have this very often, If you can't indure a small down swing it may not be for you. Not that missing ITM ten straight times is bad , but losing confidence or not learning from each trny is.

[HatesLosing]

I don't know what the key is, but one interesting thing I've observed is that there is at least one player I know of who seems to always be finishing very high in the big MTT tourneys on Party, yet he is just awful at NL $1,000 and $2,000 games.

I've seen him make a 3 x BB raise from MP with AT, get called, the flop comes T-high, he gets check-raised big after betting the pot on the flop (check-raiser bets the new size of the pot), then he just moves all-in over the top and goes broke when his opponent calls with an overpair or better.

I see him doing things like this all the time in ring games and after a ton of hands he is deep "in the red" in my PT database, yet I always seem to notice him finishing 34th, 75th, 110th, 81st, 250th, 39th, 7th, 612th, 108th, etc in these giant MTTs like the Million Dollar Guaranteed, Quarter Million Guaranteed, etc. Maybe he has just been on a hot streak with his MTTs... I dunno, but he literally seems to money more often than he doesn't. I know that must be an impossible thing to keep up in the long run for online MTTs, but the fact that he can keep it up just in the short term even over the course of 10 or so must say something.

I don't think I'll ever figure these MTTs out myself, because I lack the patience. Whenever I have just a short streak of bad finishes, I go back to the old reliable cash games.

[betgo]

The player you describe seems to have a style more suited for shallow money in MTTs than deep money in cash games.

[tek]

I don't know the dynamics of online poker since I only play live. In live tournaments, players are more likely to play it safer than cash games (where they can reload), since one bad move and they are out of the tournament. So maybe that guy is more aggressive in tournaments to take advantage of that.