Tournament Slope Visualization
 

This recent topic:

Burningyen Compares Tournament Structures at the Major Sites

Reminded me about some work I had done along the same lines about a year ago.

One thing I noticed, in addition to the different blind structures, was the variation in the decay of the field size.

To compare this across sites and tournaments, I graphed the Average Stack Size / Cost Per Round versus number of hands played.

To collect the data I entered the time, level and average stacksize at ten minute increments for a few tournaments.

Cost Per Round is just the sum of the blinds and the antes at that level. I estimated the number of hands to have a linear relationship with the actual time. I think it was about 70 Hands per hour for the online and much less for live.

http://i12.photobucket.com/albums/a2...6_image001.gif

Notice that by taking into account average stack size, you can compare rebuy tournament slope to freeze-out tournaments. Also notice how most converged around a 10.0 near the end.

This is just something I worked on. Just throwing the results out there to get people thinking of ways of quantifying tournament structure, or how to compare tournaments across type/buyin/structure.

BTW: The yellow line at the bottom left was a local rebuy tournament with a horrible structure. It was Limit first 2 levels and No Limit after that. Hardly any rebuys to speak of. All estimated based on counting tables while I played.

-Bill

Re: Tournament Slope Visualization
 

The PS/PL$50 looks funky with its positive slope (after ~50 hands)

Re: Tournament Slope Visualization
 

[ QUOTE ]
The PS/PL$50 looks funky with its positive slope (after ~50 hands)

[/ QUOTE ]

I don't think it is that funny, it just means that people bust out (increasing the average chip stack) faster than then blinds go up. In a no rebuy PL tournament I don't think this is that surprising given pot sizes are going to be dictated in large part by blind amounts due to the pot-limit and that a bunch of people are likely to go broke at the same time. I've found that in the few PL tourneys I've played players don't go broke as fast as in NL tourneys, but once people start going broke it is a flood.

It isn't surprising to me that the live tournament is so much worse than the online ones. It would be interesting to compare turbo and ultra turbo tourneys too.