Cheap buy-ins vs. Expensive

[Adsum]

Just started playing online tourneys this summer- question, " When the buyins are low- $1-$5 I don't do as well as often as $20+ buyins, is this because on the low stakes people are not playing good, stay in on too many hands etc.?" Thanks, just curious.

[daryn]

yes.

it's clear to see that if you just take it to the next step, you would want to enter as many WPT events as you can. $10,000 buyin = lots of better players, so you would do great.

[stone_7]

I believe that you are making a common rookie mistake which is to confuse Expected Value and Variance. When you are playing with donks like you find in the lower buy in tourneys your expected value goes up along with your variance. You will get busted more often with crazy 4 outers but in the long run you will win more money. In the larger tourneys your variance is decreased because people do things like fold underpairs but over time you will win less. Furthermore the sample size police will point out that you don't have anywhere near the number of tourneys needed to call this anything more than coincidence. Finally, in my experience the size of the $5 tourneys is much greater in terms of # of people which increases variance a huge amount as well. To take an extreme example of a 2000 person Party 5+1 vs a 150 person Poker Room 20+2 tourney. You will cash and make the final table less often in the party tourney but make more when you do. In the smaller tourney you will cash or make the final talbe more often but win relatively smaller amounts.