The golden ratio for MTTs

Every poker style has its golden ratio. Briefly stated, that's the ratio of winning sessions to losing sessions which you must achieve in order to assure yourself of making a profit. For the first 3 1/2 years of my online poker career, the only poker style I played was cash game, so there was only one golden ratio I needed to worry about - the cash game golden ratio. It quickly became apparent to me that the cash game golden ratio is 2; as long as you win twice as many sessions as you lose, you'll be in the clover. From my brief experience of MTTs, I have a candidate for the MTT golden ratio. Not to keep you in suspense, I believe it's 1. Two slight alterations of the canonical golden ratio formula are required for MTTs:

1. rather than counting sessions, tournaments entered must be counted instead
2. rather than looking strictly at profit, what counts as a profit is "making the money", i.e., finishing in a paid position. It turns out that the payout schemes for MTTs on PokerStars sometimes have the lowest payouts below the level of the buy in plus the entry fee. In other words, you can "make the money" and still end up losing money.

Counting last night, I've now played 10 MTT 8-game tournaments, and have made the money in 6 of them. Therefore, I'm currently achieving the golden ratio in MTT 8-games, with a little room to spare :-)

buy_in entry_fee num_players num_hands place winnings

  4500       500           6       131    15     5730

delta: $730
MTT 8-game balance: $55,140
balance: $9,550,170