Tournament Cashing Percentage and Bank Roll

[rjamesd]

Anybody read any good recomendations on bank roll size vs. buy-in? i.e., if I have a $1,000 bank roll is a $100 touney out of my league? How often should an average player expect to cash?

[Tom Bayes]

Here's my off-the-cuff recommendations regarding a bankroll for MTTs.

First, MTTs have a very high variance, in that you will lose your buy-in the majority of the time and make a meaningful cash (i.e. final table or near final table) a very small percentage. MTTs are more variable than either SNGs or ring games and thus one's likelihood of ruin with a small bankroll (i.e. 10 buy-ins) is quite high.

Now, I play mostly MTTs online (mostly of the $1-$10 variety, occasionally $20/$30, $100/$200 only if I win entry in a satellite). I play as a hobby and can afford to reload if needed at the levels I play at.

In general, depending on the game and site, most MTTs will payout 6-12% of the field. When you barely make the money, you are getting little more than your buy-in back and you will need to go deep and have some top 3 finishes to be a long-term winner. I have a conjecture (would like others input on it) that a good player will be able to cash anywhere from 1.5 to 2.5 times as often as the theoretical "average" player. So, if 8% are paid out in a particular tourney, a good player should cash between 12-20% of the time. Tighter players will cash more than loose-aggressives, but loose-aggressives are probably more likely to go all the way. In my opinion, anyone who claims to cash "50% of the time" in online MTTs either hasn't played very many of them or is full of excrement.

So, in your case, you have 10 buy-ins. Let's assume you are good enough to cash 15% of the time. Well, if we assume the binomial distribution holds, you should expect X=0 successes in your first n=10 tourneys about 20% of the time. It's even worse if you cash less than 15% of the time. And your bankroll won't survive much longer if you are only making the occasional marginal cash (i.e. win $180 in a $100 buy-in).

I don't feel like crunching any more numbers right now, but I suspect that one would need something in the neighborhood of a 30-50 buyin bankroll to have an acceptably small risk of ruin. If someone else has worked this out or if a thread exists on this, I'd like to know. This, of course, assumes you are a long-term winner. Of course, one big cash can keep you afloat for a long time.

In your situation, trying to play $100 MTTs with a $1000 bankroll would be inadvisable, assuming you cannot reload if you bust. I'd recommend either dropping down to the $10/$20/$30 level (assuming you are good enough, which you'll have to determine) or building a bankroll with ring games or SNGs instead. Since I play for fun and I think tourneys are more fun than ring games, I play mostly MTTs. If I needed to make a living off of poker, I'd grind it out on limit ring games or SNGs-not as much fun IMO.