How significant are the differences in the toughness of opponents between daily tournaments of different buy-in levels?

Excalibur has 4 tournaments per day and has a buy in of $45

Planet Hollywood has 5 tournaments per day at $80

How much tougher are the players in the latter relative to the former?

Furthermore, the Aria has daily tournaments at $140 buy in. How good are the players there relative to the previous two?

For the purposes of this thread, please focus on player quality. I'm aware that the slower blind structure of the Aria would supposedly give better players more opportunities to exploit the weaker ones. Meanwhile, at the lower buy in Excalibur, players would just open limp in early position even though they only have two big blinds, making them exploitable in such a way that is different from how poor players would be exploitable at the much slower Aria.

In short, if the Aria players are a 10 in terms of skill and knowledge (for both shallow and deepstack play), how would you rank Planet Hollywood players and Excalibur players relative to 10?

or

Put another way, if a particular player is twice as good as the field in Excalibur, who good is he relative to the field at Planet Hollywood and Aria?

At PHo at any given time there will be 2-3 people at your table that barely know the rules. The local grinders hate playing in the pleasure pit so there's some low hanging fruit there for sure. Aria & Wynn however give you a flag on HendonMob if you care that much, with the Aria tournaments being a little tougher on avg than the Wynn. During the series it could flip flop.

In your view, how much tougher is the Aria compared to PHo? Twice as tough? 50% as tough? 10% as tough?

Excalibur also has a $30 tourney at 9am 7 days a week, at least that is what I remember.

well, i guess you're not Dream Crusher after all (or you're gathering info for a friend or switching to donkaments from cash)

I'm not Dream Crusher. And I'm a cash game specialist but I've been fooling around with daily tournaments lately, especially before 3 p.m.

The reason I picked Excalibur (28.5%), PHo (27.5%), and Aria (21.5%) is because the first two have similar rakes in terms of percentage of buy in. The other tournaments in town - especially the sub-100 buck buy in ones - have an insulting 30% some rake.

In Excalibur, it is very common to see people to just open limp late in the tournament with 1 bb even if they only have 2 bb's. "Tourists" checking the nuts on the river in last position can also be seen. Most players don't know when to make standard raises and when to start push-fold. And almost everyone is very poor at taking advantage of steal situations.

Let's say, based on the above, that a Two Plus Twoer (who has read Theory of Poker, Professional No Limit Holdem, participates or at least lurks in the strategy forums, and has 1,000 hours or more playing experience) is twice as likely than the field to ITM and win straight out. This means that in the $45 Excalibur tournament, he'll win $45 each time he plays minus the $13 rake equals $32 long term profit per tournament. That's $128 per day if he plays all four of the daily tournaments available.

Now here's the reason why I started this thread. If the PHo players are exactly as bad as the Excalibur players, then our hero Two Plus Twoer will make the following: $80-$22 equals $58 long term profit. That's $290 if he plays all 5 daily tournaments. That would definitely be higher than the daily long term win rate of the 1-3 and 1-2 and even 2-5 cash game grinders playing 8 hours. (this last part is the most important part of this thread/post)

However, based on my little experience with both tournaments, the two aren't equally as bad. Excalibur is definitely worse. But by how much? Let's say the Two Plus Twoer is only 50% better than the field at Planet Hollywood then that tournament is only worth $40 to him, minus the $22 rake for a total of $18 per tournament....and it requires a bigger roll. Less profit with a bigger roll.

That's why I started this thread. I need an estimate of the difference in skill levels between the players at the Excalibur and the players at PHo. Are the PHo fields twice as good as the Excalibur field? 50% as good? 10% as good? Just as good?

Let's leave Aria out for now.

fair enough posting as someone with well over 2k hours of profitable live cash and 11k SNGs/MTTSNGs/MTTs from 2005 to BF (mostly focused on 45man turbos after STTs dried up) with a pretty respectable ITM%, place distribution and ROI i think i can say something about this.

there’s just too much variance in donkament poker for this to work for any sane person, not to even mention having to play at some of these venues instead of chilling at home multitabling. 20 days of this grind is only 100 games and if Hero takes a single day off per week that’s gonna take 80% of a month. i’d say it’d be way too easy for Hero to be down/BE/slightly winning after 3 months of this! and it could be even longer to reach what Hero’s true ROI is on this dailies schedule.

vis a vis cash games, i think you’re underrating potential 2/5 WRs if (big if) Hero will play the vast majority of his hours during peak times. but imo too many pros want to go to the casino around lunchtime, clock in for 8-10 hours during the day and then want to do social/other stuff afterwards. really they should be going really hard Thursday afternoon to ~9AM Sunday and play some shorter sessions during evening/night on Sundays and the other days if they really need hours.

Oh yeah, this requires being on a night shift schedule and speaking as someone who worked IT on the night shift multiple places, it really sucks (but prob less so in Vegas except you’re still fighting against thousands of years of human physiology)

and the other part: pros should be moving multiple times per year. snowbird it up in AZ/FL during the winter, Vegas for March Madness thru WSOP (and MM is gonna die down as more states come online with sports betting, NJ already firing), then one of the other good markets after WSOP before winter like presumably Massachusetts soon or Maryland.

it’s the opposite of It’s So Easy by Guns N’ Roses and anyone who says differently is misguided imo.

The poker room is in the casino floor where it is extremely loud and has pole dancing girls above the BJ tables which are located a stone's throw from the poker room. This is probably what Foatie means by "pleasure pit".

The "If it's too loud, you're too old" local grinders who would be knowledgeable enough not to be totally dead money are avoiding this "pleasure pit".

Hence, a higher proportion of tourists in the PHo daily tournament. Low hanging fruit. This could bring down the overall skill level of the PHo field down to Excalibur level.

The girls don't dance daytime

A true grinder who is tying to make money isn’t going to play these tournaments.

It’s just gotta be -EV.

I played a $150 ‘deepstack’ at the WSOP last night. They took $38 of the entry fee for whatever they use it for and $112 went to the prize pool. Structure sucked.

Structures in these dailies are terrible on the strip.

If you want to play a daily try Bally’s or go to the Orleans Friday night tournament. From what I have heard those are ok investments.


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FWIW, PH always has the GTD of at least $1250 ($1500 a good portion of the year), there's rarely 30+ entries, and that format never ante's so I think it's a no brainer vs. Excalibur from a format perspective for this main reason:

This is the type of play you see from the majority of players in these <$100 MTTs.

Add in free parking at the miracle mile shops and the walking distance of good cash games on that block with Aria, and Bellagio across the street and I think it's a no-brainer for the best tournament on his list. Planet Hollywood also attracts a large volume of the younger gamblers. It's very common to see an entire bachelor/bachelorette party of 5-10+, or a large group of partiers all registering a tournament because they think they're going to play with each other the whole time.

I just found that in my 4 years in Vegas, Planet Hollywood had the largest volume of beginner play over every other room in Vegas thus the "low hanging fruit" comment.

Thanks foatie:

So, can I assume that PHo is very close to as easy a field to beat as Excalibur?

If so, PHo is indeed a no brainer, especially since it is twice the buy in with identical rake percentage, free parking, more tournaments, guarantees.

I don't know if it is possible to be twice as good as the field in the PHo daily tournaments but theoretically if a player is twice as good as the field then he looks to make $80 per tournament minus the $22 rake. That makes it $58 long term profit per tournament. Granted, it would take forever to get adequate sample size and therefore lots of variance in the short term.

Regarding the fast structure, many of the mistakes which I see at the Excalibur have to do with playing short stack, namely, just open limping from late position even though they have only 2 to 4 big blinds left in their stacks. So if one knows basic push-fold strategy then that's an instant edge.

I'm very results oriented at times so based on my results I wanna say yes. Mainly because my strategy in these were to play very TAG, raise with extremely open ranges from the button to and outplay my opponents post flop. Then go into fold/shove mode after the re entry period is over.

I would rather play with a bunch of impatient drunk beginner millennials who are bad at poker at PHo than the lowstakes rec OMCs who are bad at poker at the Excalibur.