Ok, so before going to it I wanna ensure everyone who reads this understands what EV is as this was not understood by some of my poker affine friends.

For the matter of running above or below EV it does not matter if you got your hand in good or bad. The more hands you play the less your EV should differ from your results in terms of BB/100 and Chips/100.

So, some people sometimes think that online poker is rigged. I am one of those. Concerning tournament poker people often refert to the riggedness as the hand not holding "late in a tourney". After this happened to me again yesterday after 8 hours of play I decided to have PokerTracker show me if I just felt like this was true. Or if it was actually true.

I created a hand report of all my tournament hands this year. The sample size is not big being just over 30k hands. By feeling I expected to find something like I found. But I was still shocked by the extreme.

I ran over 6000BB over EV while running over 1.000.000 Million Chips below EV.

I added those 2 stats to the report because I think BB represent how you run early in a tourney (having more BB than late) while Chips represent how you run late in a tourney (having more Chips than early).

The only reason I can think of to explain how I can run that good BB wise and that bad Chips wise is that I run good early and bad late. Which is exactly what people complain about.

What do you guy think of it. Is there another explanation?

Also, in case micro stakes players using a Tracker read this, could you tell me how you run in tourneys? Is something like this commonly the case?

I think the way you explain it is that in every tournament you lose, except for when you're drawing dead, you run below EV on your final hand. This is usually for larger chip values than all the other hands, because the stakes are higher.

I always lose my last hand of every tournament I play except when I come in first. Just boggles the mind.

No **** bro, you too! Exact same is true for me as well. But not only in the online tournaments OP is complaining about, that holds true for every single live poker tournament I've ever played as well.

That can only mean one thing.

Both online and live poker tournaments are rigged.

The later I bust in tournaments, the more chips I lose. And my losing hands are often near the time I bust. Therefore, I am the same as you OP!

The point I'm making here OP is that looking at tournament hand histories from a BB/h and chips/h point of view is misleading. A bigger percentage of losing hands are late in tournaments, and they cost a LOT of chips.

It is perhaps not very intuitive but it would be better to run good early and bad in the later stages rather than the other way round, if you somehow had the choice .

It might seem like the best time to have a +1million chip ev 'luck' is at the HU stages of a set of say 5000 tournaments but it is typically better to have your run good in the first few hands.

If I get it all in in the first hand of a 180 sng tournament and double up I am quite close to twice as likely get to the final table, and overall basically nearly double my $ win rate compared to the typical slow build approach. At this point it is pretty easy to calculate how much a chip is worth and this is (the full prize pool/the total number of chips).

When heads up I am only playing to win the difference between first and second or about 10% of the total prize pool. The value of a chip a this stage is (10% of prize pool/the total number of chips).

So at this HU stage a chip is worth about 10% of it's value at the start of play. Getting lucky chip-wise early on is actually better than getting lucky on the HU stage if everything else stays pretty equal.

+1 mill chips of adjusted luck early is worth about 1,000,000/1500 or approx. 667 BI's, whereas 1 mill chips of ev luck at the HU stage is only about a 10th of this, ie. 67 BI's.

As others have mentioned measuring the 'luck' factor in bb/100 is not really too useful in tournaments. To make any sense of some analysis using evbb/100 you would need to filter for particular things like the blind level.

Anyway, trying to track the 'luck' is bad mentally if this is all you want to find out. It can be useful to watch these adjusted values but only to find out how well you are playing and to help finding leaks in how you play etc. These adjusted values are typically a little less variance heavy and quicker to close in on the long run values.

I would recommend to OP that you just stop playing in any poker game you believe to be rigged, and then you won't have to worry about anything like this.