ZeeJustin: A Case Study

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There's been a lot of talk lately about ZeeJustin, MTT ROI, variance, etc. I want to present some data that I have on Justin, strictly on PokerStars. Justin agreed to let me do this.

Okay, first, a quick word about the data I have. It's PokerStars MTTs from February 9th 2004 until virtually current (early on Monday morning, 12/12). I also have what I believe to be almost all of the $215 events (I know of a few I'm missing that I'm planning to database soon). It's not complete. I know it would be better if I had Party too, but I don't. Anyway, on to the analysis.

Clearly, he's not among the most frequent MTTs on Stars, but he's still playing enough to get an idea of where he stands. I know, from a statistical perspective, he has to play a ton of MTTs for it to be "significant" that he's a winning/losing player. However, I think as someone plays more and more, you can say with more confidence whether they are or aren't beating the game. With MTTs, nothing, it seems, is proven beyond a shadow of a doubt -- so this doesn't proven Justin is a winning or losing player, it just improves our ability to guess.

One major problem with our sample is that it has a lot of big field tournaments in it. One would expect to miss the final table pretty much all of the time in these 3000+ person tournaments, but that isn't the case in the smaller 109r. Even the Stupers (the Stars Super) have a pretty decent size field. Nonetheless, I proceed.

Here is a general breakdown of Justin's stats, sorted by # played:



Here is a breakdown of his biggest cashes:



Now, that's kind of a shocking image. Am I really telling you one of the supposed best NLHE players on the internet only has two cashes over $2500 this year on Stars? Yes, it's true. This is where the trolls usually come out and say: "but, if you take out those two cashes, he's a losing player" or "he just got lucky, the rest of the time shows his true skill - ie, he sucks." Well, in a sense, those trolls are correct. Here are his overall results, to my best knowledge:



His ITM is about right... usually 10% of the field gets paid, but he doesn't play to get into the money. The FT rate and top 3 rate are hard to analyze because he plays so many big field tourneys. His avg finish is better than avg, although not by much. Across all the players I've looked at, very few are in the 30s. Most winning players hang around the 40-45 mark. However, his ROI is pretty telling. He's more than tripled his investment on Stars on avg in a tourney. A good player can probably expect to have a 2-4x the buyin expectation, so this seems just about right to me.

If you take out the two wins, he's DOWN over $20K on Stars in that time period in MTTs. That's true as far as I can tell. However, Justin clearly isn't looking for consistency with his game selection... he's looking for big scores. I don't think he'd want to slowly build up his profit $200 at a time in 5 dollar rebuy tournaments. The whole point of playing 3500 person $200 tourneys is to bust out 50 times, win once and be ahead $100K at the end of the day. Justin knows that and he expects, over the long term, to lose most of the time (although he obviously hopes any given week is an exception). The point is you can't say "but if you take away that one win" without saying "but if you take away all those losses" as well.

Another point trolls might make is that he just got lucky yesterday. True, he did. But, like I've mentioned, the big field tourneys are about just hitting it over and over until you break through. Sunday was Justin's day. He's put himself in position to win the Sunday tournament a number of times. I recall one Big Sunday tourney on Stars where Justin had a very healthy stack deep (less than 100 people left), poised to roll over the final table. He got in pre flop with AA v AQ against another healthy stack -- and the board comes with two queens. A great opportunity lost. But that's poker... keep putting yourself in a good spot, things will eventually work out. Just because he won some key races and didn't get unlucky doesn't just make him a bad player.

Anyway, congrats to Justin on his performance on Sunday. It was clearly deserved and was the culmination of years of effort looking for a huge cash on Stars.