Expanding on point 2, push hands are MUCH stronger at late stage O8 MTTs than in a cash game, especially AKWX, even something as weak as AK48 is so so much stronger.

I have played almost 4,000 FLHE tournaments and cashed in slightly over 1,000. Interestingly, the ITM rate is about the same for tournaments with 300 players as it is for 30 players; and the rate is about the same for $200 events as it is for $20 events. Obviously 99% of these tournaments were online. My live sample size is too low to be worthy of analysis.

I think it would be very possible to have a better ITM rate - particularly because my ITM rate was probably higher for the last 1,000 tournaments than it was for the first 1,000, but I have not attempted to look into those numbers, so that is speculation.

RolledUpTrips, thanks for your advice. I believe what you say.

Correction: The above should read that I have cashed in about 800, not 1000 of these events. My bad.

Looking at the list of people who cashed in the $1500 FL Omaha 8 WSOP events for the years 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011 (which is admittedly a small sample size), each year there were 820-930 players, of who about 9.8% cashed in any given tournament. A total of 278 players cashed exactly once out of these four events (though there could be lotsof players who did not play in all four of these). There were 32 players who cashed twice in this event in 2008-2011. No one cashed more than twice.

The distribution of double cashes was as follows:
2008 & 2009: 7 players
2008 & 2010: 3 players
2008 & 2011: 3 players
2009 & 2010: 7 players
2009 & 2011: 3 players
2010 & 2011: 9 players

Over the long haul, if the field of players were essentially the same in each of the events (which they were probably not), and if the game were totally random, then you would expect that out of the 9.8% who cashed in 2008, on average 9.8% of them would cash again in 2009. That would work out to 8 or 9 players cashing in both 2008 and 2009. We see that the actual number for the very small sample I am working with is 7 players. And similarly in 2009 vs 2010 and 2010 vs 2011 matchups, the number of double cashers in 7 and 9 respectively. Notice however that the field does change from year to year. The one year gap and two year gap comparisons result in an abysmal 3 players double cashing for each of the compared years.

All of this is too small a sample to draw meaningful conclusions, but I think it poins in the direction of luck being the dominant in Omaha 8 tournaments.

PS Just for fun, here's the list of players who cashed twice between 2008 and 2011:

Allen Kessler, Andreas Krause, Ari Engel, Barry Rosenbloom, Brock Parker, Cameron McKinley, Chau Giang, Chip Jett, Chris Falconer, Chris Hyong Chang, Clint Steelman, Dale Kunkel, Ed Smith, Edgar Cheng, Faud Koubi, John Bunch, Julie Schneider, Lonnie Heimowitz, Mallory Smith, Marc Ferguson, Matt Lefkowitz, Matt Waxman, Richard Toth, Robert Goldfarb, Roland Israelashvili, Ron Ware, Scott Clements, Steve Cowley, Thang Luu, Thomas Hunt III, Todd Brunson, and Tom McCormick.

For the sake of comparison, I ran the same analysis on the $1500 Limit Hold'em tournaments from the same years. In 2008, 81 positions paid. In 2009-2011, 63 positions paid - amounting to just under 10% of the field each year. One might suppose that of the 81 players who cashed in 2008, on average 8 of them would cash again in 2009 (assuming they all played again and that the result in the game were totally random). But in fact, only one person cashed both in 2008 and 2009 (Victor Ramdin as it happens).

The distribution of double cashes was as follows:
2008 & 2009: 1 players
2008 & 2010: 2 players
2008 & 2011: 1 players
2009 & 2010: 5 players
2009 & 2011: 0 players
2010 & 2011: 2 players

Although the sample size is again necessarily small, it appears that successful players perform more consistently at the WSOP's Omaha 8 event than they do at the Fixed Limit Hold'Em event. I find that surprising. But all of this could be just the chance result of looking at only four tournaments.

It seems notable that as with Omaha 8, no one cashed three or more times in these four events.

And here are the repeat winners from 2008-2011: Andrew Kerstine, Chung Law, Erik Lopez, James Meek, Jason Tam, Marco Traniello, Matt Keikoan, Matt Matros, Terrence Chan, Timothy Ebenhoeh, and Victor Ramdin.

This belief is insane, especially when you consider live weekly MTTs are structured as turbos greatly increasing the variance and luck factor.

If there's a way to structure a bet around this I would happily book lots of action (and happily escrow). Ideas?

I wish I still had my HEM db from 2008-09. I believe I had a substantial edge in the online LO8 tourneys I played in the $5 to $20 range. My ROI and ITM were both maybe 20-30%. (My NLO8 ROI was around 100%.) This was only over 100-200 tourneys, though, which is still a VERY small sample.

Tourneys are ridiculously high-variance relative to the same cash games. "Most authorities both online and in print cite O8 as a low variance game" goes out the window, although O8 tourneys are probably lower variance than same-betting-structure HE tourneys.

Transaction costs would be outrageous. You'd have to hire top-notch players such as Buzz refers to by offering them more than their opportunity cost to participate in settling this best.

Nevertheless, I have no doubt mgADDict is on the winning side here.

Very important points. Note also that because hands run so close, you're often going to be calling off your case chips because of pot odds.

E.g. CO opens, you put him on top 17%, which means he could roughly open as wide as A5KT. You're in the big blind with 1 big bet after posting, and you have KJ72. Your hand is absolutely terrible, but you have 36% equity so you pretty much have to call off your stack. Obviously this kind of scenario sends variance skyrocketing for both players! (Lots of opponents, who got to this point by playing tight, would wrongly fold the BB here, which mitigates your variance as a good player who steals appropriately.)

A few months ago I wrote something about my paradigm for adjusting from O8 cash games to tourneys. I'll see if I can dig it up.

play more poker; place less bets...?

fyp ...

Depends on the timing and blind structure

a small local casino has one that blinds double every 15 minutes (5-9 hands)

Very rough figures and nowhere near enough tournies to conclude anything!

gg though.

In large number of online limit o/8 tournaments (over nearly a decade), with an avg buy-in a pinch over $75, I have cashed 17% . . . with an ROI of 108%. Of course, I have more 1st and 2nd place finishes than I do 3-10 combined . . . which probably says something about I approach o/8 tournaments in general.

The 90% figure is just silly . . .

Limit tournaments are inherently high variance; however, I would also guess that OP has a lot of room for improvement. O/8 is really hard, and I feel like you need super o/8 skills in general, in additional to a solid understanding of tournament strategy, in order to really do well.

Maybe it is. You certainly have lots of support for that point of view. To quote a few who have responded already in this thread:I should not have written 90%. I don't have data to back it up. And Da Mayor presented data that clearly refutes 90%.

My impression several years ago when I was regularly playing in brick and mortar weekly tournaments (with 60-100 participants) was the same relatively small group of individuals seemed to make it to the final table week after week. At the time I thought these weekly brick and mortar casino Omaha-8 tournaments were probably similar to pot-limit Omaha-8 in the sense that the better players relatively quickly dispatched the weaker players.

I remember vividly one stretch at one of the Los Angeles casinos where the same player won five weeks in a row. (There were at least sixty entrants, usually more like eighty, each of those weeks).

So it seemed to me (and still seems to me) that skill is very important in Omaha-8 tournaments. Luck clearly plays an important role, but when the same group places week after week, I attribute that result to skill.

There would come a time in each of those weekly tournaments, when (due to ever increasing blinds) the average stack size would be not much larger than the blinds. And then if Hero got involved in a hand, somebody would generally be forced all-in. However, as I recall, that didn't usually happen until the final table.

Skill would seem to prevail until that point was reached. (But at that point it could be more or less like a crap shoot).

Anyhow, when responding to Da Mayor's opening post, I shrugged my shoulders and estimated maybe a top notch, patient, skilled, Omaha-8 tournament player could at least place in the money over 90% of the time.

As I think more about it, 90% is too high an estimate.

At any rate, I think a skilled player has a distinct advantage getting past the bubble and to the final table in an Omaha-8 tournament. It's not just all luck.

That's my opinion.

Buzz