lol_donkaments

This year I have played 539 hours of tournaments (live and online) and made a profit of $34,914. I have played 80 hours of cash (all online) and made a profit of $55,541. In tournaments I am averaging $64.78/hour and in cash I am averaging $694/hr. Over this small sample size I am making ten times as much money per hour playing cash as I am playing tournaments.

I especially got into tournaments this year. I focused on tournaments because I thought they were more exciting than cash games, because you can make huge scores, and because generally I feel tournament fields are softer than cash game tables.

Today I decided to play the WCOOP $500 6-max rebuy and $1k PLO tournaments. I played hard in both, won a lot of pots, and busted in both six and a half hours after starting. My head hurt and I felt like crap. It was another nice day in Boulder, and I got calls throughout the day about hanging out, playing tennis, etc. I almost didn't play the tournaments in lieu of studying game tapes from each of last week's NFL contests. Of all the annoyances tournaments provide, being forced to carve out big chunks of time without being able to leave is the most irksome to me.

I think I am done with the small buy-in tournaments. By small, I mean pretty much anything below $5k buy-in. Every once in a while I will play a 1k or some Sundays or something, but for the most part I think I am going to stick to a sparse diet of short cash game sessions when I feel like it. The longest I have played cash in 2008 in one session is 3.5 hours, and 90% of my sessions have been two hours or less. I like playing online cash because I can get a session in without it being the day's main activity.

As for the theory that tournaments are more lucrative than cash games, that obviously hasn't been the case for me personally. I have long maintained that I am a beast at cash and a mediocre tournament player, and the results continue to support that argument. 80 hours is not a big sample size of cash obviously, and the tournament results may be skewed by a lack of a final table at the WSOP, where many of those hours were logged. But I did win one pretty big one, and OPR has me in the top .2% of tournament players on both Tilt and Stars.

As I continue to play fewer and fewer hours, I will try to make the most of those hours. This should mean cutting the donkaments out of the schedule almost entirely.