by Andrew Brokos
Originally Published in Two Plus Two Magazine, June 2007 issue
The televising of high-profile poker tournaments has led to an explosion in the number of tournaments offered by internet and brick-and-mortar card rooms. There are now thousands to choose from on any given day, but not all are created equal. This article will assist players in deciding which tournaments to enter by examining the factors that affect the enjoyability and profitability of the experience.
Determining which to play requires identifying why you are interested in tournaments in the first place. For the purposes of this article, I’m going to assume three categories that should speak to most tournament players:
Amateur– The amateur plays primarily for fun, though obviously winning is more fun than losing. He may be a winning player, but he is in no way financially dependent on his profits at the table, and often he does not have a dedicated poker bankroll. Tournaments appeal to amateurs, as they are played for a fixed buy-in but offer a lot of excitement and a shot at a large prize.
Ring Game Professional– This player relies on poker as a source of income, whether or not it is his sole source, and he plays primarily ring games. He might play tournaments for a break from his routine, to take a shot at a big score, or to take advantage of opportunities to play higher stakes with relatively inexperienced players.
Tournament Professional– Whether pro or semi-pro, this player competes regularly in poker tournaments and derives substantial income from the game. He keeps a poker bankroll separate from his other finances, and while he may play ring games occasionally, tournaments are his bread and butter.
Field size
The first question to ask is whether you want to play against dozens, hundreds, or thousands of competitors. In tournaments, as in any other form of poker, good players make money from less good players. And just as a good player would have a higher expectation sitting at a table with two fish than at a table with one fish, he can expect his Return on Investment (ROI) in a tournament to grow along with the size of the field.
If large field tournaments offer the highest expected return, why play anything else? Lower variance is the biggest reason. A strong online tournament player could easily have a six-figure annual expectation playing only on Sundays, when all of the major poker sites have their largest weekly tournaments. However, he could also very easily lose six figures in any given year pursuing this strategy. Such is the nature of variance in these huge tournaments. That may be part of the excitement for the amateur or the ring game professional, but the tournament professional will need to supplement these very profitable long shots with more consistent winnings.
Time is another factor. It may be less of a concern for a professional, but an amateur who enjoys the occasional tournament, or even a ring game professional accustomed to short sessions, may not have the time or energy to play his best for the hours or days it can take to final table a large tournament.
Buy-In
To the amateur who does not operate from a bankroll, the deciding factors here will be the amount of money he is comfortable losing and the level at which he is competitive. In general, winning tournaments with higher buy-ins requires defeating more skilled opponents, though there are important exceptions to this rule discussed below.
The key is to play at a level where one’s decision-making will not be clouded by the amount of money at stake even at the final table. The majority of a tournament’s payout is decided at the final table, so even perfect early game play cannot compensate for mistakes made at this crucial stage. Players who cannot trust themselves to make the right decisions when the stakes get high should not enter the tournament at all, or at least should not do so expecting to win anything in the long run.
Given the variance in tournaments, a professional working off of a finite bankroll may actually have to play below his skill level, at least until he has his first big score. Because ROI and standard deviation will vary with the size and difficulty of the field, there are no strict formulae for bankroll requirements. The FAQ for 2+2’s Multi-Table Tournament forum suggests having 50 to 100 buy-ins, but this really depends on how heavily one relies on tournaments and on which events one is playing regularly.
For example, a small stakes player looking to grow his bankroll exclusively through tournaments with fields averaging 1000 runners can expect some severe swings and would need at least 100 buy-ins, preferably more, to pursue this strategy. Although he might finish in the money 15% of the time, he will win primarily small prizes that will not offset his losses.
The top-heavy structure of tournament payouts concentrates the vast majority of the money at the final table. An average player will make the final table only once out of every 100 attempts, and even a very strong player will do so only 2-3% of the time. A bad run of luck could result in 100 straight attempts with no final tables and only a handful of small cashes, leaving the player’s bankroll decimated.
If the player were focusing instead on tournaments with an average field size of 100 players, he would likely final table well over 10% of the time. His rewards would be disproportionately smaller, since ROI decreases with field size, but his variance would be lower as well. In other words, he would be much less likely to experience a run of 100 tournaments with a significantly lower than expected number of final tables than would his counterpart playing tournaments with 1000 runners.
Ring game professionals need not be so cautious. For example, a player properly bankrolled for 1-2 NL might enjoy playing a weekly $200 tournament that consistently attracts thousands of players. Variance will be extremely high, but since the player is playing it only once a week and presumably making money more consistently from his ring game play, he could safely add this tournament to the mix using whatever bankroll he finds sufficient for 1-2 NL.
Field Difficulty
Although it is generally true that higher buy-in tournaments attract better players, there are important exceptions, such as how much publicity a tournament gets. An extreme example is the main event of the World Series of Poker, which entices people who ordinarily would not spend more than a few hundred dollars on a poker tournament to put up $10,000 for the opportunity to play with professionals they recognize from TV.
On a smaller scale, poker rooms may publicize a particular tournament through e-mails to their regular players, other advertisements, or a guaranteed prize pool. Smaller buy-in tournaments, called satellites, that award seats to larger tournaments instead of cash, can also soften the field of a larger event by funneling in less experienced players who would not otherwise play at higher stakes.
No Limit Hold ‘Em tournaments are so popular that even the weaker players have had a lot of opportunities to learn and improve. Though tournaments for other poker games can be hard to find, they will often feature players who are much weaker than the worst No Limit players. And because these games are rarely played in a tournament format, even the experts may lack familiarity with tournament theory.
Blind Structure
Blind structure refers to how many chips players start with relative to the blinds and to how quickly the blinds and antes increase. Amateurs looking to get the most play for their money should prefer tournaments that start with a lot of chips and raise the blinds slowly. Those who expect to be outclassed might as well play shallow structures where the skill edge held by better players is minimized.
Professionals need to consider what kind of structure will play to their strengths and what will be best for their hourly rates. Ring game pros may benefit from deeper stacks similar to those found in cash games, whereas tournament experts may find they make the best decisions when stacks are shallow, as they navigate these late-game situations much more frequently than their opponents.
Opportunity cost and hourly rate are also important factors for professionals. Even though deeper stacks allow for more skillful play and higher ROI, this may not be enough to compensate for the fact that they make the tournament last longer. A professional might earn more per hour in a shallow tournament than he would with a slightly higher ROI in a tournament that took much longer to finish. Similarly, online professionals can more effectively multi-table tournaments with shallow structures, where many of their decisions will be binary choices between moving all-in or folding rather than complex strategies played out over multiple streets.
Antes
The presence of antes, especially large ones, makes loose, aggressive play necessary. Players who are adept at stealing and defending blinds should prefer large antes, whereas tighter players should seek out tournaments with small or no antes. In general, Poker Stars and Party Poker feature smaller antes than those on Full Tilt Poker and Ultimate Bet, and live tournaments tend to have by far the largest antes.
Prize Structure
The most important element of a tournament’s prize structure is the cut taken by the house. On the internet, a rake of 10% is standard at smaller stakes, with a slightly lower percentage taken at buy-ins of $100 and above. Smaller live tournaments sometimes charge rakes of 20% or higher and withhold additional money to pay staff. Combined with a shallow blind structure, such a high drop can make these tournaments nearly unbeatable.
The way the prize pool is paid out can be important as well. Given that a player with a positive expectation is more likely than his adversaries to take first place, he will have a slightly higher ROI in an event that awards 35% of the prize pool to the champion than in one that pays only 25% for first. In the second tournament, the additional 10% of the prize pool is distributed more flatly across a larger number of lower places, where the winning player is less likely to finish.
Strong players can often accumulate a lot of chips around the money ‘bubble’ which divides the lowest prize finishes from those that pay nothing at all, as many players will play extremely tight to avoid bubbling. Depending on the payout structure, however, tightening up may actually be correct. The 2006 World Series of Poker main event, for example, awarded $14,957 to the 873rd place finisher and nothing for 874th. After this initial bubble, however, payouts climbed very slowly, without another 15K jump until 81st place. Thus, players who started tightening up when 900 were left weren’t losing much if any equity by doing so. Aggressive players would do better under a steeper payout scheme that punished excessively tight bubble play, whereas tight players or those very concerned about finishing in the money should prefer a structure with a pronounced bubble followed by a relatively flat payout.
Satellites
Tournaments that pay winners with entry to a larger event rather than with cash can be uniquely profitable. Some are winner-take-all affairs that capture the benefits of a top-heavy payout structure discussed above. Though these are high variance, they offer a marginal boost to ROI relative to a flatter payout.
Satellites that pay multiple spots represent the opposite end of the spectrum, a completely flat payout, and can also offer a unique edge. When navigating the bubble of these satellites, players who do not adapt in sometimes counter-intuitive ways can bleed equity to their more knowledgeable counterparts.
Satellites can create bankroll dilemmas, however. Some internet sites will offer a cash equivalent in lieu of a seat, but generally a player who is not bankrolled to play tournaments with larger than $20 buy-ins should not play $20 satellites to $100 tournaments, since he may not be a winner at the $100 level and regardless will experience much higher variance in his payouts than he would from other $20 tournaments.
For players looking to take occasional shots at high buy-in tournaments, especially high profile events that may be uniquely enjoyable or profitable, satellites can make such an opportunity affordable. The edge from the satellite itself is an added bonus. Unless there is an option to cash out the seat, however, tournament professionals should be wary of regularly playing satellites at the limits of their bankrolls.