**Official ADANTHAR $1k MiniStep Challenge** (Xpost)

[EverettKings]

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

When they say freeroll to the next Step, do they credit your account with the entry+buyin and you can do whatever you want with that money? Or do you have to use it specifically for that next step?

[pergesu]

Nah, they don't give you cash. They just give you an entry into the particular step, so that when you sign up for one there's a "pay with cash" or "use an entry"

It's still interesting nonetheless. I never looked into it until just now. After I finish my bonus on AbsolutePoker, I'm going to try it out. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

After cashing out a pretty large chunk of my bankroll to care for the holidays and year-end family expenses back in November, I had to find a way to build back up. When I looked at the options, I simply didn't want to invest countless hours at the micro games clearing bonuses, so I looked to SNG's, partly because I wanted to develop my NL touney skills, and partly because I was sick of ring games.

I've usually done fairly well at the $11-$33 level, but the variance just seemed too steep for my meager BR, so I decided to try the mini-steps instead. I took my measely $220 I had left and gave it a go.

After a few attempts at the mini #1 (one buy-in, a couple freerolls), I looked at the structure again and came up with the following plan:

1) Buy directly into Mini #2 ($20+2)
2) Play for 5th place
3) Turn on the jets when I'm guaranteed a re-roll into my current step level.

Now, I have admit I've put in about 160+ hours this month into this, and had to play COUNTLESS re-rolls and a few dropbacks (twice from 4 back to 2) but I've had the following results:

10 Direct Buy-ins = $220
2 Bust-outs before Step 5
1 Finish OOM on Step 5 (Finished 7th)
7 Cashes on Step 5 - (2)5th=$400, (4)3rd=$2000, (1)1st= $2000

$4400 total winnings, $220 Fees = $4180 profit, at roughly 160 hours = $26/Hr.

Now, I know this doesn't seem like a lot to most people, but considering the bone-dry bankroll I started with, this worked out very well. Not only have I built up enough to be flexable again hunting the bonus $, but I've also given myself a cushion to deal with the variance again on the $11's and $22's.

For me, this was far more advantageous than grinding out bonuses playing micro-limits, and had a more manageable risk/reward factor than just playing the standard SNG's. I forced myself to play smarter poker overall when the game was still 5+ handed, and got to really work on honing my short-handed skills after I met my top-5 finish goal. And of course, once reaching the final table, I had to really focus on the game and play to the best of my ability against a wild range of competition (the same gentleman who took me out on my only non-cash final table was, ironically, the same guy I beat HU in my only victory two days later).

I'm going to continue next month with this strategy, so I'll fire up PT and crunch some hard numbers for you guys if you're interested. But I wanted to throw this little story out there because I've found it to be a very good alternative to the standard bankroll-building grind.

Thanks for listening,

MotorCityMike

[pergesu]

k I didn't read the whole thing...all I read was something like, "My roll was too small for the variance of 11s, so I decided to play mini-steps instead." That seems like 110% backwards to me.

[The Yugoslavian]

[ QUOTE ]
k I didn't read the whole thing...all I read was something like, "My roll was too small for the variance of 11s, so I decided to play mini-steps instead." That seems like 110% backwards to me.

[/ QUOTE ]

Don't bother reading the rest, he lucksacked not busting his roll.

But it's not necessarily a bad thing to do...just ridiculously time consuming and high variance.

Yugoslav

[EverettKings]

[ QUOTE ]
After cashing out a pretty large chunk of my bankroll to care for the holidays and year-end family expenses back in November, I had to find a way to build back up. When I looked at the options, I simply didn't want to invest countless hours at the micro games clearing bonuses, so I looked to SNG's, partly because I wanted to develop my NL touney skills, and partly because I was sick of ring games.

I've usually done fairly well at the $11-$33 level, but the variance just seemed too steep for my meager BR, so I decided to try the mini-steps instead. I took my measely $220 I had left and gave it a go.

After a few attempts at the mini #1 (one buy-in, a couple freerolls), I looked at the structure again and came up with the following plan:

1) Buy directly into Mini #2 ($20+2)
2) Play for 5th place
3) Turn on the jets when I'm guaranteed a re-roll into my current step level.

Now, I have admit I've put in about 160+ hours this month into this, and had to play COUNTLESS re-rolls and a few dropbacks (twice from 4 back to 2) but I've had the following results:

10 Direct Buy-ins = $220
2 Bust-outs before Step 5
1 Finish OOM on Step 5 (Finished 7th)
7 Cashes on Step 5 - (2)5th=$400, (4)3rd=$2000, (1)1st= $2000

$4400 total winnings, $220 Fees = $4180 profit, at roughly 160 hours = $26/Hr.

Now, I know this doesn't seem like a lot to most people, but considering the bone-dry bankroll I started with, this worked out very well. Not only have I built up enough to be flexable again hunting the bonus $, but I've also given myself a cushion to deal with the variance again on the $11's and $22's.

For me, this was far more advantageous than grinding out bonuses playing micro-limits, and had a more manageable risk/reward factor than just playing the standard SNG's. I forced myself to play smarter poker overall when the game was still 5+ handed, and got to really work on honing my short-handed skills after I met my top-5 finish goal. And of course, once reaching the final table, I had to really focus on the game and play to the best of my ability against a wild range of competition (the same gentleman who took me out on my only non-cash final table was, ironically, the same guy I beat HU in my only victory two days later).

I'm going to continue next month with this strategy, so I'll fire up PT and crunch some hard numbers for you guys if you're interested. But I wanted to throw this little story out there because I've found it to be a very good alternative to the standard bankroll-building grind.

Thanks for listening,

MotorCityMike

[/ QUOTE ]

This is exactly how you can beat these ministeps if you're patient enough to put in the hours. You will reroll MAAAAAAAAANY MAAAAAAAAAAAAANY times, but you can avoid busting with enough care. This seems counterintuitive and "noobish" to the normal STT crowd, as playing just to get into the money is clearly suboptimal in a normal structure, especially since it is this very thinking that players here profit from exploiting in a normal STT.

However, in a ministep the structure is so different that this strategy, assuming that few people use it, may not be far from optimal. Busting in 4th or in 10th doesn't matter in a regular game, so passing up a small edge early is retarded (especially since those chips will give you huge bubble leverage later). But here where the money is far more distributed, busting on the bubble is actually quite good if it allows you to reroll, and passing up those small early edges prevent you from busting and makes your investments last. This does come at the cost of fewer wins, but if you play properly and patiently you can have a lot of low-percentage shots at moving up. You can almost fold your way to a reroll in ministep 1, for example.

However... cashing in 7 of 8 step 5s is absurdly fortunate. On average, for 8 buyins you'll get 8*400 = $3200(assuming youre an average player, maybe only $2000 for a weak player or $4000 for a fantastic player, but $4400 is basically unsubstainable), meaning more like $20/hr for a typical run.

Also, because you get so few step 5 shots, you could easily bust in 7 of the 8 of them or you could only get 4 shots and bust in 3, giving you one $400 cash in 160 hours for a whopping $2.50/hr. Ouch.

That's why these things are really only for people who:
1) Have no real bankroll
2) Can't afford (or don't want to) make a real investment
3) Are playing mostly just for fun and would enjoy just playing a match and rerolling.

A lot of new players fit this description and it's not a bad system, since you really cant lose more than a dozen step 1 buyins without cashing if you play them right (and don't get impatient, since it may take weeks and weeks to complete).

So hats off to you for doing so well Mike, but I hope that with your new-found bankroll you can break into some better poker games. Play some .5/$1 NL cash games, play 200 $11 STTs, hell play Omaha or Stud. Now you can afford to find other ways to make money.

Good luck.

Everett