I'm not sure what this means

[davidross]

As I read other people giving their results in tournaments I have compared them with mine. I don't keep exact stats, so this is just an approximation, but I make the money far less often than most of the people here say they do. I'm guessing I cash around 5% of the time, and since they pay around 10%, I would think my number should be higher.

However, when I make the money, I seem to do very well. I rarely squeak into the money then go out, I think I make the final table at least 1/3 of the time I make the money, and since I usually play events with hundreds of entries, there are usually 8 or 9 tables making the money.

Obviously since I rarely squeak into the money, I usually have a playable amount of chips when I get there, this is probably why I have a better chance of going deep in the tournament.

What concerns me is that maybe I'm missing opportunities by not cashing as often as I could. Since I seem to do well after cashing, should I be adjusting my play to try and cash more often? Or is the reason I'm doing well after cashing simply because I won't let my stack get down to the critical level before the bubble?

[Ghazban]

I'd say that, if your ROI is high, a low ITM percentage shouldn't bother you unduly. If the psychological effect of not making the money more often bothers you, you could tighten up more around bubble time and have more low payout finishes. Basically, if you're showing a profit, what's the problem? Personally, I have the opposite problem in that I play too tightly and often make the money but rarely make the big money. I think I'd much rather be in your position as, any time you're investing a lot of time in a tournament, you're getting a reasonable payout while I'm grinding away a lot of time just to get my entry refunded.

[durron597]

I agree with Ghazban. This issue comes up a lot on the One Table Tournaments forum; people getting caught up in ITM% when ROI% means so much more. If you are playing very profitably, it doesn't matter how often you cash.

This is what people are saying when they say "don't worry about squeaking into the money if you want to make the final table"... you seem to understand that very well already, don't change [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

That being said, you could try playing slightly tighter on the bubble, but only slightly.

[jdbessix]

I agree with the ROI statement/thought process. I would much rather go into the money with a good size stack and have the opportunity to go deep. Playing for four sometimes five hours to make maybe $100.00 seems like a waste to me.
With your talent in ring games, it would just make more sense to go into the tournament thinking deep as opposed to "just making the money". In the time it takes to squeek in, you can probably make 10 times that amount in ring games.

[Raiser]

David,

I'm glad you posted this because I was wondering about it myself. Like you I don't cash too often. Unfortunately for me I haven't made a final table yet in my brief life as a MTTer. It's good to see that a respected tourney player has a ITM rate similar to mine. Now I just need to use my chips better when I reach the money.

[mrbaseball]

I think I'm kinda the same way. I don't make the money as often as I would like but when I do it's usally with a real playable stack getting me into final table contention. I often play boldly (maybe too boldly?) in the pre-bubble and bubble stages looking to pick on the squeakers. It usually makes me miss the money or come into it healthy.

[Tosh]

The thing to remember is that noone here has a relevant sample of tournaments to judge a win rate, ROI or ITM.

[t_perkin]

Do you know of anyone who has done much work in this area?

i.e. how many MTTs you would need to play to get an accurate read on your ROI, or even for that matter your ITM.

does anyone have any figures on what a good player could expect in terms of ROI or ITM?

Any posts or other work would be interesting.

I have just done a bit of work on a simulator for SnGs to project and examine ROI, RoR and ITM. I was thinking of extending it to try and do some work on MTTs. But if a lot of work has already been done then I wont bother.

Thanks for any info anyone has.

Tim

[Tosh]

Simple answer, no.

I'd also be interested in anyone who has put some really good research into it. I guess its not like SNGs either in the way you can really dedicate yourself to a level. I think most of us just jump in whatever is available, and thats a problem because to really study it you need to look at the same buyin results. Your ROI could change so much after just 1 event, just for example MLG on Sunday; I would not even like to guess how much his ROI jumped up after his great win. The other thing is that a losing player could have a great deal of luck and hit a huge score in a big tournament and look like a big winner for years.

As your long term MTT performance will be focused around the big wins, whether you get your buyin back in a tournament is not of great importance long term. The fact that these big wins are increasingly rare the more people in the tournament, makes the sample necessary larger and larger.

I think you'd need to win a specific tournament 50 times to iron out a lot of the variance. I'm thinking 10000+ tournaments is often necessary, depending on the size and your edge of course. I just don't realistically see long run data existing for MTTs.

[t_perkin]

There are only two ways that I can think of to get at what ROI a tournament player might expect.

One way I can think to apporach it would be to find some top class 1-table, 2-table and 3-table SnGers and see what sort of ROI they are each getting. Perhaps from that one could extrapolate what the sort of ROI one could expect from an n-table tournament. But this really isn't many data points to work with....


A poker room might be able to look at an individual player's ROI for SnGs and then compare to their ROI for tournaments. Applied over an entire customer base it might be able to extrapolate a relationship between SnG ROI and Tournament ROI.
A player would then only need to know their SnG ROI to know their Tournament ROI.

There are of course a huge stack (no pun intended) of other factors which would be unaccounted for in both of these techniques. So no need to post and say how crap they are. But if you can come up with anything better....

One other thing:

[ QUOTE ]

As your long term MTT performance will be focused around the big wins, whether you get your buyin back in a tournament is not of great importance long term.


[/ QUOTE ]

Absolutely right, but it may well make a considerable difference to RoR for a given BR. Considering the massive variance of MTTs RoR is a pretty major problem for all MTT players.

Just some thoughts

Tim