Anatomy of an MTT NLHE cash

With last night's cash, I've now had four MTT NLHE cashes in a row. You must forgive me if I feel I now have some expertise in how to go about securing them. My advice divides neatly into three parts. The first two parts can be followed by anyone at all. The last part is the tricky one. Here they are:

1. wait until there are 5 minutes or less left in the late registration period to join the tournament
2. fold, fold, and fold again; then, just for spite, fold some more
3. win pots when you must

When I first started playing MTTs, I was really divided in my mind about whether it was better to join them as early as possible or as late as possible. Now, I have no doubt; it's far better to join them as late as possible. Why? For the simple reason that the longer you wait, the more opponents there are who have already hit the rail; these opponents, by definition, can never beat you. Another way to look at this is that they've donated their buy ins to the remaining players, so you want to join when as many buy ins as possible have been donated in this way. Yet another way to look at this is that the more dead money there is in the pool, the better it is for the live money.

As for folding, the plain, simple, unvarnished truth is that in an MTT, it's almost always better to fold than not to fold, and most players simply cannot bring themselves to fold as often as they should. I know this for a fact, since I myself can't fold as often as I should, despite the fact that I fold much more frequently than the average MTT entrant.

The final bit of advice separates the good players from the great ones. You can't teach this. There's no practical guide for how to go about it. It's a feel thing. You have to have great feel. Another name for it is instinct. Yet another is card sense. You're either born with card sense or not. Thankfully, I was born with it :-)

style flavor buy_in entry players hands place winnings

MTT   NLHE      900   100       9   104    21     4677

delta: $3,677
MTT NLHE balance: $-24,823
balance: $7,424,221