[The Venetian]

Some of you guys aren't thinking about this right. It's not that you're increasing your buy-in by 50% or whatever to only increase your stake by a small amount. Your earlier buy-ins are gone. It's what your $X additional add-on will return to you in additional EV. If that amount is greater than $X, then it's worth it.

The fact that, in most cases, the add-on gives you more chips/$ makes it virtually mandatory except in rare cases.

A while back, I wanted to create a spreadsheet to let me enter tournament-specific data to make a mathematical decision as to whether it was +EV to add-on or not. I found that unless the tournament was extremely small, the add-on was for less chips/$, or I had an excessive amount of chips in play (like 20% or more), the add-on was always +EV.

Here's some math to help:

Take the Stars $11 rebuy. 1,500 entrants (T1,500), 4,000 re-buys (T1,500), 1,000 add-ons (T2,000), so a total prize pool of $65,000 and 10,250,000 chips in play.

You have 5,000 chips and are considering whether to add on or not and are an average player.

Assume (and this is the possible catch) that all chips are of equal value because of the massive amount in play, divided up by hundreds of players, and the long distance from the lowest payout.

In this spot, 5,000 chips would be worth 5000/10250000 of the prize pool, or $31.71.

7,000 chips (taking the add-on) would be worth 7000/10252000 of the prize pool, or $44.38.

The difference of $12.67 is your EV for adding on. Since you're only spending $10, it's +EV and you should do it.

To me, the interesting thing in massive rebuys is that even what we think of as a "huge stack" still benefits from the add-on.

If you have 50,000 chips in the same spot, your pre-add-on EV is $317.07 and post-add-on EV is $329.69, for a difference of $12.62, barely any different from the other spot.

I used Excel's Goal Seek to find a spot where adding on in the $11 rebuy in this spot would be breakeven EV for the average player and it's over 2,000,000 chips.

Another way to think about this is that 50,000 is considered a huge stack after the first hour in the $11 rebuy, but the average chip stack at the final table, where the real money is, is 1,000,000. An extra 2,000 would still be nice to have, especially when you consider how it will double as well if you double up.

Further, if you factor in the idea that a single chip in your stack would be worth more than in the average player's, it makes it even more +EV to add-on.

In most cases, the only spot where it would be -EV to add-on was if you were acutely aware that you were much less skilled than the other players, so the additional chips added on would not translate into anywhere near your expected return in actual $.

I'm aware that it is very easy to come up with extreme scenarios that poke holes in the above, and that the fact that tournaments are not winner-take-all (often paying out 100-200 in big events) change things slightly, but they will not change things for 99+% of situations that you'll find in online or live tournaments, and if it comes up, you won't be that wrong by just adding on anyway.

Always add-on.