Another try at an MTT

I got my bankroll back up to around $200, and when yesterday I found an MTT with a good structure, I spent $5.50 on a fairly large tournament (by post-Black Friday standards).  I'm still learning how to do many of the things in Little's book, and I won't even remember most of the ideas, let alone understand them deeply, without at least two more readings.  I'm currently going through the book for the third time.

I started out fast, and spent most of the first half-hour in the top 10 (at one time I was second).  Then my chip stack slowly dwindled until after about 75 minutes I was out in 169th place, not even close to the money.

It's going to take a while to get used to a new playing style, and I made a lot of small mistakes that added up to a big chips loss.  There was one spot where I played it safe and it was clearly a spot that called for a semibluff shove.  The thing is, I remembered that from his book, and it's a pretty simple concept.  When you have a less-than-great hand, but the hand has draws that make it likely to improve on future streets, going all-in is mathematically correct.  The chance that your opponent will fold to the shove, plus the chance that you will improve to the best hand, makes the semibluff shove a play that wins a lot of money over time.

I don't know why I didn't make the play.  I made a classic poker mistake, waiting for a better spot to get my chips in when I had a good spot right in front of me.  I didn't make a lot of crazy plays that lost chips, I failed to make the plays that win chips.

Still, I can see improvement.  I'm getting a lot better at adjusting to different players and to table dynamics.  I can usually tell in the first five minutes whether the two players on my immediate left are going to be easy to run over, or whether they will fight back and force me to adjust the range of hands that I open with from my now-usual 50% range on the button, or to change the size of my raises, or make some other adjustment.

I'm definitely going in the right direction.  I just have to keep working at it.