Quote:
Originally Posted by NewOldGuy
For average skill (in this field) the answer is simple. P = places paid / entrees. For higher or lower skill the answer is much harder.
I think this isn't actually quite right, in general its very difficult to estimate what OP is asking but lets take a simple example of a HU single elimination tournament with 2 rounds and 4 players that is winner take all.
Lets imagine there are 2 "average players" A, 1 fish F and one strong player S.
Lets suppose the strong player is 80/20 against the fish and 60/40 against an average player in any one round.
Then supposed the average players are all 50/50 against each other and 60/40 vs the fish.
An average player has a 1/3rd chance of playing each player type in the first round and his average chance of winning the first round given that is 50%, which makes sense as he is of "average" skill.
However, in the second round, he is significantly more likely to face the strong player than the fish (because the fish is more likely to have been eliminated in round 1). Because of this his odds of winning the second round are below 50% and his odds of winning the tournament as a whole are less than 1/4. The more rounds of the tournament that there are the more this effect dominates.
This is true even in an MTT setting where over the long run an "average" skilled player relative to the starting field will be a huge dog vs the skill level of his opponents when he reaches the final table on average because these will be heavily weighted toward being the best players in the tournament. Conditional on reaching the final table he would have a much less than 1 in 9 chance of winning the tournament and of course when it gets down to heads up an average player would usually be significantly outclassed.
The mathematics of poker has a chapter on all this, I believe its chapter 26 and it continues into 27/28. Even with no rake, it turns out that the winnings in tournament poker would be very heavily weighted towards the very top players and the "average" skilled player would be a loser. The winner take all format is also the highest EV option for the best player in the tournament compared to standard flatter payout structures and the flatter the payout structure the less being more skilled matters.
Last edited by swc123; 01-27-2016 at 12:45 AM.