One key ingredient for long-term poker success is experience facing different types of player. It’s one thing playing against the same group of poker buddies every week, but new players bring new challenges and fresh strategies to consider. Any MTT will obviously feature more players than you would find in a single-table tournament or a ring game, exposing you to a greater variety of playing styles and tactics in a much shorter time.
With larger fields, it follows that the prize pools are much larger. Most MTTs will pay around 15-20% of the field, with the biggest payouts reserved for the top spots. Where success in a single-table tournament may reward you with a payout around 4-5x your buy-in (an amount comparable to a good win in a ring game), MTTs often award prizes worth 20x the buy-in or more!
As blinds go up in an MTT and the average stacks get smaller and smaller, it’s important to stay active and aggressive. Keep waiting for good hands and you’ll soon see your stack whittled down to nothing, so playing tight from start to finish is not an option – at some point you will have to take a risk. Stealing blinds, using positional advantage and running well-timed bluffs are all key poker skills you can learn by playing multi-table poker tournaments.
In a ring game it’s easy to reload more chips, so long as you have them in your bankroll, but in most poker tournaments you only live once! Learning how to protect your stack, when to take chances and when to save your chips for a better situation are all useful weapons to add to your arsenal, and MTTs will hone these skills like nothing else.