You're never going to succeed with a nitty style simply because it's going to immediately show up in a million different ways on peoples HUDs. Since for me it was just entertainment and I could reliably pay for my vacation in the smaller tourneys I went back to small ball. The biggest upside being able to say I got my name published in Card Player magazine. I finally adapted to the slower play, longer rounds, bigger field and frankly better players to leave after two days of play with the same payout from winning one three hour Binion's tournament. I tried playing in a couple of Venetian Deep Stack events and usually busted out. I could easily make $1k+ a day clearing Binion's tournaments.

They were lulled into indecision and procrastination by the low early blinds, not realizing that they escalated quickly to force stacking out of the small players. Live players still weren't used to the even faster pace of online play but with rapidly escalating blinds it was critical. I specialized in small, quick tournaments for this reason. Then you have to suck it back up and move on to the next one. >You can play great poker, sometimes over the span of a few days, and suddenly get hit with a cold deck or get unlucky and poof you are eliminated with nothing, along with your chance at a 5 or 6 figure top prize. I personally don't think I would have the stomach to play tournaments full time though. So for me, cash games are the way to go if your goal in poker is to make money, but tournaments are a fun way to chase the dragon from time to time. The intensity and increase in stakes/prizes as the blinds move up and more players get knocked out and you inch closer to the big money is almost like chasing a high. That being said, as brutal as the swings in tournaments are, cash games have nothing like the rush of running deep in a poker tournament.

There's less variance and the money is more consistent. I played a ton online before the Black Friday days and did pretty well, and will usually try to play a few big live tournaments a year, but these days I mostly just play cash games as a fun hobby and a way to grind out some extra income. The variance is just insane, which is why a lot of professional players are backed, or sell some of their action or swap with other players. You can play great poker, sometimes over the span of a few days, and suddenly get hit with a cold deck or get unlucky and poof you are eliminated with nothing, along with your chance at a 5 or 6 figure top prize. It's entirely common to go 15, 20 tournaments without cashing.

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