Psychology and the insane variance in MTTs
A while back I wrote a short post for a poker forum about how to combat the variance you find as a tournament pro. I will have it posted in the articles section here but I am realizing how important it is to really embrace some lower stakes tournaments that you normally play and just prepare yourself to truly grind. I was an old school grinder that used to play 8 tables at about all times and would basically fire up any tournaments I felt I was +EV in. I played rebuys from $5-$100 and freezeouts as low as $10 and as high as $2500. Yet something happened after I did so well in the WSOP this year. I became bored with online poker after the super deepstacked play of live and wanted to embrace the new challenges that live poker offered. All of the sudden I went from someone who embraced a $10 freezeout in my schedule to someone who couldnt take a $100 freezeout seriously. I would enter some high limit tournaments and more times then not would leave with either no cashes or an insignificant one. I was riding an absolute roller coaster of variance because I was just playing tournaments that, while I had some edge, this edge wasn't nearly as big as it was at the lower limits. So when I ran bad, I ran really bad and the mental effects this took constantly turned small downswings into long downswings.
What they say really is true, good results lead to good play and bad results lead to bad play. When you are running bad you usually start to slowly play worse and worse and it just exacerbates the problem. The last month or so, after starting to coach for this site I began some self reflection and came to the most elementary of conclusions about why I continued to constantly go up and down, I was constantly getting negative feedback. While losing in a $100r, $1000 and $200 in a night might be almost identical in terms of final profit as it would be to lose in these tournaments in addition to final tabling a $10 freezeout, but psychology they are polar opposites. If you understand tournament variance you can understand that a winning player can go an entire calendar year in the red without it even being that significant a losing streak. Think about that. A +EV player can easily go an entire year and lose money. This is the form of poker we accept and this is the variance that goes with it. You really have to do anything you can to mitigate short term variance in addition to the psychological toll that losing 90% of the time takes on you. Playing some smaller tournaments with smaller fields can really help to initiate some positive feedback in a sometimes unbearably negative format of poker. It might not pad your bankroll a whole hell of a lot, but it just might help you sleep a little better of a long day of tournaments.