My tournament analysis was right on the money

I mentioned previously that my analysis of the PokerStars 90-player tournaments was that I could be very patient and wait for good cards.  Doing that is a little strange for me, since I've been working on opening up, playing more hands, having more options, and being able to "change gears" in the middle of a tournament.

However, the tournament that I just finished had me looking at a series of terrible opening hands.  Even using my most liberal hand selection range, I was getting very little worth playing.  So I didn't play.  I folded for quite a while starting out, I think that I dumped my first 30 hands.

I kept doing that, playing a very occasional decent hand.  In this tournament, where the top 12 cash, I was 39th of 41.  I was 28th of 30.  Still, my M was over 20, so I wasn't desperate yet.  Finally, getting very low on chips, I won a nice pot and had a few chips to play with.  But I wasn't moving up, I was hanging on.

After I won that pot, I looked at my statistics.  I was 17th of 19.  I had been playing for an hour and 38 minutes and there were 73 hands.  I only went to showdown once (and won it) and I won 2 more pots without going to showdown--a total of 3 pots, less than 1 per half hour.

In most large MTTs, and even most tournaments of approximately 90 players, that would never work.  I am studying a section of one of my poker books where the chapter author recommendings stealing the blinds at least once each orbit (once every 9 or 10 hands).  But I was confident of my analysis of this particular tournament, and my patience was rewarded.  I finished 8th and picked up a small cash (a little over 2 buy-ins).  Considering what I had to work with, I'm satisfied with that.

There is a saying in poker--The answer to every question is "it depends".  There is no right way to play a hand, or a tournament.  Decisions depend on the stack sizes, your table image, certainly the tournament structure, and even whether the good players on are your left or your right--along with innumerable other variables.

My tournament had an unusually good structure, but in general, folding as many hands as I did is terrible strategy.  Don't try this at home.