Step Highers

[fnord_too]

I just got arround to looking at the monte carlo results for these, but it looks like the step highers, starting at level 4, offers some pretty insane return for risk.

Assuming at level 4:
Win level 5 (top two spots) 24%
Third 14%
fourth 13%
fifth 13%
sixth 11%

Level 5
First 13%
Second 11%
Third 10%

These are probably unrealistic, but here's what they yield:
ROI 23% (mean)
Max Neg (mean) -17.5K
Max Neg (SD) 18.55K
Max Neg (worst case out of 10k 10k runs) -160K (!!!!) (Thats less than 80 buy ins)

Assuming .9 hours per step 4, 1 hour per step 5

$/table hour: $434.68

I need to tweak the finish assumptions, but I think these can be very low variance (relatively) due to the deep payouts in level 4 (which are all money, not buy ins to lower level step highers). This smooths out results tremendously.

For reference, with the same assumptions, the average max loss starting at level 5 is 62K, with the max being just under 800K. (SD being 64K). In terms of buy ins, that is a huge difference.

These things look interesting to me. One big concern though is the lack of games that get going. I have not thouroughly researched this yet, but my guess is that very few step higer level 5's go off every day, and probably there are not that many level 4 that go off, either.

Has anyone here played a lot of any of the steps? There are several wild assumptions I am making, and would love more grounded oppinions.

[Jman28]

Wow. Thanks for doing all this analysis, by the way.

I need to get a roll and play these guys.

I've played a few. I think your assumptions are reasonable for an expert. 3rd-5th may be a bit high in step 4, maybe by 1% each? I dunno. It's really tough to guage stuff like this.