Late registration considered harmful

Last night, I played two MTT 8-games again, and again made the money in the second one. So far, I'm maintaining the MTT golden ratio. One thing I can't help but notice, however, is that I've never made the money in the first MTT of a multiple MTT session. Why might that be? I have a theory. I think it's likely due to the fact that a fair percentage of the time in such situations, I'm late registering for that first MTT. Late registration definitely has its pluses and minuses. I'm starting to think the minuses outweigh the pluses. The biggest minus is that when you late register, you're giving yourself a shorter runway for takeoff. If you don't manage to get airborne fast, you're going to crash pretty quickly. The biggest plus is that there's dead money in the prize pool - entry fees that belonged to players who have already busted, meaning there are less players to contend with.

I happened to notice that last night's second MTT and the previous night's second MTT both started at the exact same time - 11:42pm eastern standard time. That could be a coincidence, but intuition tells me it's not. I firmly believe another MTT 8-game will start tonight at that time. If I were smart, I'd wait around until 11:42 and only enter one MTT tonight. However, intuition also tells me I won't have the patience to do that :-)

buy_in entry_fee num_players num_hands place winnings

  4500       500           6        16    45        0
  4500       500           6       196     4    34800

delta: $24,800
MTT 8-game balance: $70,140
balance: $9,565,170