Quote Originally Posted by sickread23 View Post
Where do I start with this post. First off people, stop posting such ambiguous questions. Sharks are concerned with taking mtt's down. When you look at mtt's on merge, the fields are small and over 40%of the money is in the top 3 spots. ITM doesn't mean shit. If your going to win mtt's that have large fields, your going to have to play a higher variance style of poker. Because the fields on merge are on the smaller side, it makes sense that top players would have a slightly higher ITM% as compared to players who play with bigger fields like on PokerStars. I know a player that played here and thought he was a stud. Guess what? His ITM % was a lot higher than some of the top guys on the merge, yet he was a break even player in mtt's. You have to win mtt's to make them profitable. Sure your going to find spots where your best play is to sit tight and get in the money; but by and far your main goal in mtt's should be to set yourself up early for deep runs. I had a spot on the bubble in a mtt today. I contemplated jamming 30bb's on the button with blinds and antes out there to avoid getting 3bet shoved on by an active BB. Then I had a moment of clarity. I had KQ and decided to take the higher variance line and raise call-off a shove by him because I thought he would likely get out of line given the bubble. Sure enough he shipped it on me. Now he could have had hands that were flipping with me/slightly ahead or even have me dominated; but the point is I wanted more chips to go deep and wasn't afraid of stone bubbling it. I called and had his Q10 dominated and help for a real workable stack. I ended up making it down to like 50 left and ran JJ into QQ 25bb's deep. The point is to play to win. Hell what's an extra 5-10% ITM boost going to do for you, if your stack is never healthy enough to make the top 3.
now it all makes sense. obv that is your style and it works for alot of people...just not my style