Alright, this thing definitely dragged on for much longer than it should, but apparantly these ministeps were a real pain/bore to play so it took a few prods to get adanthar to finish these suckers but....
Adanthar busted. Sweeeeeeeeeeeet-- I mean, how unfortunate.
If you go to my
Ministep Calculator
you can tinker with a little applet I made to simulate the ministep challenge. It just takes your given bankroll and (based on the given percentages) simulates stepping through the levels until you either hit step 5 or don't have enough $$ to buy in any more. It does this a few thousand times (or however many times you tell it to) and spits out some data. Anyway.
I thought that the numbers that I gave Adanthar in that applet were quite generous, and he came out to be about 25% to succeed. I don't doubt that he's an outstanding tournament (and satellite) player, but a >1000% ROI is a little trickier to achieve than it seems.
I dealt with this stuff a whiiiiiiiile ago (when these ministeps were brand new) to figure out if they were worth playing. After playing a bunch to get a feel for my chances and running some numbers, I basically came to three conclusions:
1) The ROI is
HUGE for a good player.
2) The variance on cashes is
ENORMOUS and you need to really invest in this and be sure that you're a winner.
3) The number of games that you have to play is
GINORMONSTROUS. For a strong player, on average, youll play about 80 games (mostly in the form of step 1 freerolls) for every step 5 entry that you earn. So that means 160 games per cash. Though you'll have only paid about 8 buy ins. Do the math and it's like $30-$40 bucks an hour, but considering the absurd variance, you'd have to be a very patient soul to play these properly.
I wish I could give some more satisfying numbers on Adanthar's performance (like finish distributions at each step, etc), but party is being stubborn loading the account activity so I'll give a quick synopsis (Adanthar will probably chime in later).
A) Adanthar ran badly. No doubt about that. But that's part of the intolerable variance of this little challenge.
B) He didn't get past ministep 3. He spent almost all (maybe 85%) of his steps on ministep 1.
C) I would gladly take this bet up again with anyone.
It's amazing how split the forum was on the outcome of this bet when it turned out to be so heavily one-sided (or so I still think). It just goes to show you how bad we people are, intuitively, at grasping fuzzy probabilities and understanding the depths of variance. Doing computations away from the table can help fine-tune your intuition, not to mention keep you from getting an ear full of cider.
Cheers,
Everett