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I don’t like losing tournaments, but if it can happen to
the very best players, it can certainly happen to me. Losing an MTT
(multi-table tournament) while being aggressive is light years ahead of
passively folding your way into the money. Consider adjusting your MTT goals.
You might just find your results improving in the long run.
The steep payout structures of online MTTs affect the ideal strategy
dramatically. A steep payout means the prizes increase rapidly as you get
closer to first. The lowest ITM (in the money) players often receive little
more than their buy-in plus a little extra.
The window below is a screenshot of the payouts from the nightly $150+12
tournament at Poker Stars, on August 1, 2006. This is a one the most popular
higher-stakes tournaments online. On this night, 450 players entered.
 You can see that 37th through 45th places don’t even double their buy-in.
Sure, but $108 profit is good, right? No, frankly, it’s not. Not if you’re
playing $162 tournaments!
Given the choice between 46th and 45th, of course I’ll choose the latter. But
given the choice between an easy 45th with virtually no shot to do better and
busting out 48th and knowing I took a real shot at catching one of those
four-digit prizes that go to the final table of nine…again, I’ll take the
latter every time.
This is an important note: the stakes do not matter! Perhaps an example
from a $2 tournament would make this point clearer, but it should not be
necessary. If you are properly bankrolled for the level you are playing, you
must play for the lucrative payouts of the higher places.
A quick analysis of that prize distribution shows that the percentages
received increase dramatically.
Places 45-37: 0.40%
Places 36-28: 0.50%
Places 27-19: 0.70%
Places 18-10: 1.10%
9th: 1.70%
8th: 2.60%
7th: 3.50%
6th: 4.50%
5th: 5.50%
4th: 7.00%
3rd: 10.50%
2nd: 15.40%
1st: 25.00%
Most online poker sites use similar pay scales.
If the sites wanted prize distribution to be flatter, they might switch to an
arithmetical increase. In that case, the percentage increase between each
place would be the same. With 45 places paid, 45th would receive only 0.097%,
or $65.21, which is less than the buy-in, but each place would receive $65.21
more than the previous one. A player would be slightly positive in 43rd place.
First place would receive $2934.45.
Why wouldn’t sites switch to such a system? Time and player prize interest are
the keys. If players received increasing awards in this manner, play would
grind to an absolute halt towards the end of a tournament, because it would be
profitable to play extra tight in hopes of moving up slightly. If tournaments
took forever to play, the sites would lose money because nobody has that much
time, and they would stop playing as many tournaments. The other argument
against a “perfect” flat payout is player interest. Would you be more excited
for the chance to win $16,875 or $2934 for your $162 investment?
It is a fair argument that payouts could perhaps be slightly flatter; that the
endgame of tournaments relies too much on luck. While this is true, we must
remember that poker is a long run game. If you make the right tournament plays
long enough (with the proper bankroll), your luck will even out over time.
There are two important exceptions to this rule, which are not the subject of
this article. Those are fixed-payout satellite (qualifier) tournaments, and
tournaments that you entered via satellite that are outside your normal
bankroll. In the case of multi-entry satellites, many places at the top may
receive the same prize. In the final Poker Stars WSOP satellite, a $370 event,
over 7000 entered and over 230 won a World Series of Poker seat. In that
tournament, finishing in 230th place was equally as good as 1st. In that
situation, extra tight play approaching the bubble (waiting for others to make
the mistakes) is often correct.
The other time you can adjust your strategy on the bubble to a tighter game is
when you have entered the current tournament by winning a satellite. Suppose
you play the $11 freezeout satellite to the Sunday Million at Party Poker and
win a seat. The buy-in for that tournament is $200+15, which would normally be
way outside your bankroll. Now you can approach the bubble cautiously. The
smallest win in that tournament might be $400 that day, but you must consider
that a $389 profit would be very significant to you. It might mean little to
someone who buys into tournaments like that directly all the time.
The next article in this two part series gives an example of how to apply
payout analysis to actual bubble play.
Part One of Two:
Analyzing Payouts
Part Two of Two:
Tournament Bubble Play
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