CRStals said:
Hey Matt, welcome to CardsChat! Great to have you here and answering questions from our amazing loyalers!!!
My questions to you:
1) Do you advocate for playing on multiple online sites and dividing your bankroll among multiple sites, potentially limiting your ability to play higher stakes, or keeping your funds mostly on one main site where you may have a psychological advantage if you played up in stakes?
2) What is your personal opinion on moving up in stakes - do you like taking small shots or waiting until you are able to sustain yourself at a higher buy-in?
3) Do you have a personal breakdown between the number of tournaments you play that are straight cash versus satellites, where you need to cash twice to effectively make a profit?
Looking forward to your answers Matt!
Cheers
Chris
Thanks for the warm welcome
🙂
As for the questions:
1) If something as trivial as the distribution of your
bankroll between online sites is affecting the stakes you're playing, then you're probably burning a bunch of EV that way. You should be playing the highest stakes you can beat for a decent winrate, and even if your bankroll is split across multiple sites, you shouldn't be playing lower stakes because of it.
It's a bit like choosing to go to dinner at a trashy restaurant instead of a good one, just because the extra $20 you need in order to pay the bill at the better place is currently in a different room of your house.
2) Aggressive shot-taking is usually the right way to go in the long term, but it depends on a lot of factors. If poker pays your bills, you should probably be more conservative, but if you're a recreational player and your financial situation isn't affected by poker, then you should probably be shot-taking any time you can find a good game to play in.
3) I play almost no satellites (old-style satellites are the #1 most boring form of poker by a mile for me, Milestones are marginally less so), and to be honest most people completely misunderstand satellites to the point where they probably should avoid them.
It's not really true that you "need to cash twice to make a profit" - a satellite is just a regular tournament where the prize is whatever your EV in the target tournament is. If you have a +25% ROI in the
wsop Main Event, then when you play a $1k satellite to that event, you don't win $10k, you win $12,500. But if you're a losing player in the WSOP Main Event (say for example, -25%), then winning a $1k satellite to that event doesn't win you $10k, it only wins you $7,500.
So the bottom line is that if you're not actually a winning player in the target tournament, you shouldn't play the satellite in the first place, because you're actually competing for a -$EV opportunity. As soon as a player wins a satellite to a tournament in which they don't have a positive ROI, their EV is immediately handed out to everyone else in the target tournament who does have a positive ROI.
Most pros play very few satellites, and when they do play them, it's to events where they would be playing the target tournament anyway - they're just trying to squeeze some extra EV out of the opportunity.
Hope that helps!
