Quote:
Originally Posted by RoadtoPro
Cool I’ll have to work in some donkament studying and watch some tournament content as well.
Good read rr and fair enough. Pokerbros structures seem to be different than? Cash % is around 20% for the large mtts I believe, on average- as you can see in the above example. Once you cash, the pay jumps are small for a while so that’s when I start getting super aggro and push FE.
Seems to be a big difference from structures where only half that amount cash (10%). Would you still have a similar mindset?
yeah it's situational, obviously depends on how much the min cash is and what percentage of the prize pool goes to the final table, in something like a 9 handed sng where top 2 or top 3 cash and with super flat payout structures i'm taking the nit approach and just trying to cash with upside
it's hard so say for any specific tournament, but once you get over a few dozen players it's nearly always only worthwhile to view anything beneath final table as suboptimal, you'll even notice if you look at play history of the top online mtt players that they have surprisingly high early bustouts, way more than the average rec, that article i shared even pointed out that Shaun Deeb paradoxically cashes at a lower frequency than the average player during a time when he was quite arguably the best mtt player in the world
simply put, you'll realize a lot more equity with that mentality playing cash games instead - this is 100% why most pros, and the best ones play cash games because the mtt game is a high variance path that only rewards those who regularly visit the final table
a good exercise for you would be to build a simulator, i imagine you have some coding skills, but if not, it's super easily done with some google searches and excel - i do this with DFS to determine whether or not it's reasonable to play (sometimes in dfs you can get tens of thousands of people in a contest and first literally gets 40% of prize pool)
so you can take that prize structure of the regular mtt you are thinking of playing, use a random number generator =RANDBETWEEN(1,500), even assign yourself an edge over the field (ie if there are 500 people playing you only have the number generation range from 1-401 instead etc) and then run it for however many lines to simulate however many entries and use vlookup to have each finishing position correspond to a prize, subtract your total buyins and voila, you just simulated 100 entries of that tournament giving yourself a significant edge over the field
now, take a look at the times you simulated 100 and profited vs the times you simulate 100 and lost money - if you can find situations where you made money instead of lost it without final table appearance then that'll answer your question - but my guess is no, at least for DFS, I've found in most tournaments I need to finish top 3 at least 50% more often than expected using random chance in order to have any hope of being profitable in the long run, this is a major reason why i have mostly abandoned large field tournaments and stuck to smaller contests and cash games - it's just too much of a lotto ticket because difference between a 250x payout for first vs a 20x payout for 10th is usually a single reception - i've won or lost tens of thousands of sklansky bucks based on garbage time receptions or a guy throwing the basketball up in the air to end the game and the official scorer gave him a turnover, a few times someone was in line to win a million dollars and ended up winning a few hundred because when his qb kneeled to end the game he lost 2 yards rushing
/endDFSrant, thankfully poker not nearly so top heavy in prize pools, but it's still the same concept and frankly why there is so much overlap between the two because because its a lot of the same concepts involved