[freehat]

I think having an apathetic mindset towards your results in MTT's is essential for long-term success in this form of poker and in your long-term mental health. MTT's are addictive in nature due to their payout stucture which is on a variable ratio similar to a slot machine. Pulling a slot lever and the short-term results are out of the user's control. Results in tournaments will largely be weighted to who wins those coinflips when the blinds rise and the short-term results are not really up to the player's control. I tend to think of tournaments as playing cash games with the stakes keep increasing or a form of martingale blackjack system with slight edges that will take a long time to manifest itself.

For those who make big scores early in their career it will be hard to continue when they start regressing to the mean. It is much more psychologically damaging to go from 500,000 to 100,000 than from -300,000 to 100,000.