Variance question for those who play a lot of MTT's

[Jerrod Ankenman]

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I have finished in a few final tables online in my day, but I am pretty sure my ROI is negative thus far.

Although I play mainly ring games. I would like to start adding a nightly MTT to my schedule to see if it will break up the monotony and encourage me to play the 4-8 hrs the MTT is going. However I am curious about the variance involved.

Let say I play the nightly 15+1 at Party, it averages 2K entrants. Lets say skill wise I am better than 50% of the donks in the tourney, but 50% are better than me (for now).

How many MTT's before I can ballpark my ROI with any confidence? (for stats guys, lets say 66% confidence)

Will it be worth my time? or Do I need to be better than 90% of the players skill wise to make it worth my while? (lets say worth my while is a measly $10/hr average over 100?? tournaments)

[/ QUOTE ]

Well, you can't use a normal approximation because the results are so skew. My off-the-cuff estimate is that you should probably have about half as many tournaments as there are players before you can have any reasonable estimate of your expectation, unless it's absurdly high (like seven buyins/tourney or something).

By the way, if you're better than 50% of the field and worse than 50% of the field, you're going to lose money. The reason is that 1) you pay juice and 2) the field self-selects the better players as the tournament goes on, so you'll be overall playing against a field that is better than you.

Jerrod Ankenman