What ROI's are possible in small live MTT's ?

For example. My local room has m-f 125 buy in 100 player avg/ m-f night 145 100 player avg. Players are pretty bad in general. There are no antes at any level. Blinds go up every 30 min. Payouts are funny. Usually once the final 10 are reached they play for 1/2 and chop the rest of field chops, then once you get down to like 5 players they'll chop a lot).

Any thoughts on these structures and possible ROI's. Thanks.

Even though players in these sorts of things are the worst of the worst the blind and buyin structures are also very bad. You're probably looking at 20-50% ROI.

My guess was 50% for the very best grinders that should not even bother wasting their time playing those games

Not many live tourneys around me so I want to play in them just to get the experience. They have occasional 350 buy ins Monthly 550 buy ins and the Arizona State Poker championship series in August. But it's wild to see some of the stuff these players do. I make a fair amount of bad decisions but some of the stuff is comical. I have to think a 100%+ ROI is possible but we'll see. I do track them with my live tracking app so after maybe a year I'll have a sample to look at.

On June 01 2015 00:38 SuperCardUser wrote: Not many live tourneys around me so I want to play in them just to get the experience. They have occasional 350 buy ins Monthly 550 buy ins and the Arizona State Poker championship series in August. But it's wild to see some of the stuff these players do. I make a fair amount of bad decisions but some of the stuff is comical. I have to think a 100%+ ROI is possible but we'll see. I do track them with my live tracking app so after maybe a year I'll have a sample to look at.

Good Article on MTT Variance:

http://www.nsdpoker.com/2011/02/mtt_pros_2/

MTTs are the sickest form of poker when it comes to variance which makes these ROI numbers really hard to get. Most MTT pros have a backer or sell a lot of their action.

You could have a decent win rate and still easily be down after 500 tourneys



That table is based off of large field tourneys so it's not representative of the small tourneys you're playing in your local card room but will be what you have to look forward to for bigger tourneys. See the 180s table for something a bit closer to the games in your card room.

I'd guess the chops reduce the possible ROI a little- the more dominant you are in a field the more you want top heavy payout. But that also reduces your variance, and as showcased by Smuft, you might not have the necessary bankroll to withstand a bad streak well within what should be expected.

I haven't really played for a couple years, and smaller mtts would yield a smaller ROI than bigger ones, but from 2008 until 2011 or so (I can't access this on OPR anymore, apparently some opt-in is requried) I sustained a ROI above 100% over like 5000 MTTs, average buyin somewhere between $10 and $15 and average field of ~couple thousand. I'd expect that playing live allows for greater ROI, but significantly smaller fields will make it shrink even more, and I think today it'd prolly be hard to sustain that type of ROI due to general skill increase. And hey, it's very possible that I ran like a Jamaikenyan. But if pretty much everyone sucks - and that you can expect to be the case in a small buyin live tournament field without lots of online players - and if the structure is slow enough - I don't see why you shouldn't be able to get 50%.

Sorry if I hijack but what I wanted to ask is if there has been any math done on correlation between your evbb/100 (your winrate in tournament chips) and your ROI. Anyway I think what I've been doing is kinda similar to playing live tournaments;

-> I've been trying to play these $3.5 45 man/$2.5 180 man turbo tourneys on pokerstars as an experiment and im losing alot (-19% ROI after 625 games id actually be losing if there was no rake)
-> It's 28,298 hands played so its like 45 hands average per tourney that I get to play, most of which im folding
-> my evbb/100 is like 12/100 so far, I imagine I can't sustain that (maybe lits like 7 i would guess? Im mostly just folding and not paying attention) so maybe I got dealt alot of hands so far. I'm actually winning 626k chips because i had a lot of 1sts

Before I started this I imagined that winning tourney chips and ROI would be insanely closely correlated so this whole thing has been very susprising to me. I would like to the data if I play like 10k games instead of 600 but I don't think I can summon the willpower to do that (and live it would just be impossible)

I'd like to hear comments on Jelle question also. Just out of curiosity.

I don't know the answer but I can speculate that they are not particularly correlated. Certainly their is a large difference between ROI and evbb/100. One argument to support this speculation is that there are cash players who have a high bb/100 in their respected game but those skills do not translate well in tournaments to maintain a high ROI. ( meaning those players know how to accumulate chipEV but they are missing some other key components in their game that's hurting their ROI potential.)

I personally have a low evbb/100 and I am less frequently chip leader/above chip average then normal.

damn that is extremely counterintuitive to me. I always thought that if cash players did poorly in tournaments, it would simply be because they play poorly with shallow stacks

so does that mean I may have squandered a lot in ICM spots where I should have tried to ladder up instead of accumulating chips? I do have a ton of bubble finishes now that I look at my data, my 2nd most common finish was the bubble. I tend to push a lot because people seem unreasonably tight to me and I don't really understand ICM. A lot of my opponents seem willing to fold themselves completely to death and forfeit their chance of winning even if it doesnt guarantee them a mincash

I thought ICM was hugely important for SNG but that it became less and less important the bigger the field. Or well, the 'bubble' for an MTT is final table, while the bubble for an SNG is the actual bubble.

On June 07 2015 16:19 Liquid`Drone wrote: I thought ICM was hugely important for SNG but that it became less and less important the bigger the field. Or well, the 'bubble' for an MTT is final table, while the bubble for an SNG is the actual bubble.

This.

Thanks for your input every1. Maybe the bubble is more important in the 45 man SNGs that I was playing as well? I don't really know how to analyze it

the structure is as follows:

1st - 31% of prize pool
2nd - 21.5%
3rd - 16.5%
4th - 12.5%
5th - 9%
6th - 6%
7th - 3.5%

So with the buyin of $3.5, 7th place pays $5. That seems like air to me and that's really all the thought I put into it. What would you consider to be the sweet spot here? The payouts get bigger very gradually imo

the sweet spot is top 7. once you're there, price pools increase quite fast. in this SNG example it's like, first you beat 80% of the field, and then price rapidly goes up afterwards, but first prize is actually only like 9x that of 7th.

Compare with like a 1000 person mtt,then you might have to beat 85% of the field to get to the bubble, but the increase isn't that big until you've beaten 99%, and first prize is what, 100x that of the bubble? Basically to go from the bubble to final table in an MTT you're gonna have to double up multiple times (150 becoming 9, so your stack should be 16x bigger, or doubling 4 times).

I dunno math well enough to break it down fully, but it's like, it just seems to me intuitively that chip accumulation becomes much more important in the second scenario, while survival is much more important in the first. To look at some very basic scenarios for chip accumulation vs tournament life that might illustrate the difference between an MTT and SNG we can picture the following scenario. It's obviously unrealistic and really lacking, but it might illustrate the point.

Say that you always have a 50% chance of doubling your chips and a 50% chance of going broke, and there are 8 players left in the SNG. Everyone has 5k chips. Doubling up at this point leaves you with 10k vs 6 players with 5k, whereas losing leaves you dead. if you get to 10k, then you still need to double up twice to get all the chips and win the tournament - but 50% of the time, you lose 11% of the top payout. For simplicity we can say that the other players with 5k stacks will also flip with each other shortly after, so there's one more flip needed when there are 4 players left, and then one more when there are 2.

'Cursory' math would lead me to believe that taking a flip on the bubble of this tourney would lead to losing 50% of the time, 25% of the time getting 4th, 12.5% getting 2nd and 12.5% getting first. adding 25% of 4th, 12.5% of 2nd and 1st, we get around 10% total. With 8 players and 100% to fight for, you certainly shouldn't do something that leaves you with less than 12.5%. If I get it right, this basically means that in an even stack 45 man SNG bubble, you would want at least a 62.5% chance of winning before calling an allin would pay off. (assuming no dead money, as 62.5 is to 50 what 12.5 is to 10.)

Looking at a random MTT that finished yesterday with 1104 entries, 144th place (bubble) was $70, whereas 10th place (FT bubble) was 419, and 9th place was $507. First price was $7700. Here we can see that with the field going from 144 to 12 (so with it becoming 1/12th the size), the prize pool actually only became 6 times bigger. But if you get to 9th with equal stacks, then your expected value is around $3000. (FT prize money added up = 27000). While $419 is only 6 times the initial bubble for making the field 1/12th the original size, $3000 is more than 40 times the initial bubble, for making the field 1/15th the original size. In this scenario, taking flips with 150 people left makes way more sense.

Say once again, all stacks are equal. 150 people left. Taking the initial flip here leaves you with a 50% chance of nothing. Then the other 50% leaves you with: 25% 75th place ($100), 12.5% chance of 38th ($141), 6.25% chance of 19th ($185) and somewhere around 3.12% chance of FT ($3000). Adding those we get expected value of $160 or so, equating to getting in the top 20% of the still present field. In the SNG, flipping on the bubble would however leave you with an average outcome lower than 4th place (equating to getting below top 50% of the still present field.)

This basically just looks at how in an MTT, flipping on the bubble isn't -ev the way it is in an SNG. It doesn't even take into account how having a big stack is key for further chip accumulation without flips, which is probably the main reason why you'd take a MTT gamble that you wouldn't take in an SNG.

Also this was like the first time I tried to use math to showcase something in like, many years, bear with me if I fucked up. xd

Nono that made total sense u convinced me. Thanks a lot! Damn I think I spewed a lot on the bubble actually trying to run people over too much and calling shoves for pot odds and winning some chips but also usually being the first guy at risk and bubbling a lot. I can also see how those mistakes are enough to wipe out my earnings at the earlier levels because they all happen at such a critical stage.

Jelle maybe your shoving is ok if you have smaller stacks behind you that you can put pressure on. But calling shoves you should probably be super tight in bubble situations KK+ maybe. I may be wrong, I've been putting in work with ICMizer and looking at ranges for these type of situations and when you get close to pay jumps all ranges tighten up and the calling ranges go squeaky tight.

But I'm not authority yet so make sure you double check with pros.

But of course your stack size needs to be taken into account. I'm talking like a 10 bb stack size. If you have huge stack that's not in danger you can really open up . Mid size stack gotta stay tight. Really small stack gotta open up shove range and tighten up call. Anyone know if this is incorrect let me know. I love any feedback. Thanks.