Just for the fun of it, I did a quick calc and worked out how many games we'd need to play to have a >50% chance of being sat in a top pay out 1000x tourney
Turns out if we haven't seen the spinner show a 1000x prize by our 13,683rd game, we're finally running bad. Before then, well, we were worse than a coinflip anyway.
Yeah, that's right, a massive 13,863 games just to have a 50% chance of seeing one of the top games. That's obviously no guarantee we're going to be winning it. So if we played 200 per day, five days per week, we're still ahead of the game if we see one within three months.
So, I wanted to see exactly how important is this one off "lottery" game to our results.
Say we played 10,000 games at $1s, hitting games with the various prize pools at exactly the expected rates. First let's exclude the top three tiers, which would, pro rata, would be expected to constitute a total of just three games between them. Obviously an average player wins 33.33% of games, but let's say we're an above average player, say we win 36%, with wins split equally among the prize pools too
7738 * 2 * 0.4 = 5571.36
1351 * 4 * 0.4 = 1945.44
800 * 6 * 0.4 = 1728.00
100 * 10 * 0.4 = 360.00
8 * 25 * 0.4 = 72.00
Total prizes = 9676.80
So, we've played 9997 games and we're still $320.20 in the hole.
So, it all comes down to these three big games. OK, let's assume we hit one of each (which would still be above average luck because we'd only be expected to have hit a theoretical half of a 1000x game, and one and a half of a 100x game)
Because of the prize structure, we get paid even if we don't win these big three, so we're guaranteed 100+20+10 = $130 from our three big games. That's going to get us back to just $190.20 loss. But with a win rate of 36%, we can only expect to win one of them though.
If we win the $100 we get an extra $90 and finish our 10k sample with a
loss of $100.20
If we win the $200 we get an extra $180 and finish our 10k sample with a
loss of $10.20
So if we want to show a profit for our 10k sample then basically we
HAVE to win the 1000x game, something that we've got less than 40% chance of even being seated at by the time we reach game #10000
Even at a much more demanding 37% win rate, excluding our big three games, we'd still only be at$ 9945.60 from the 9997 smaller games, so still $51.40 down without the big three, and so once again our success or failure over 10k games all comes down to the lottery of just three games in a 10k sample.
I know there's supposed to be variance in poker, but this is absurd. A solid 37% ITM player in a game against just two opponents should be able to have confidence in winning something after 10k games.
I know it's been said a lot already, but the rake really is too high, and needs to come down a lot. Also the top tier really is far too high as well, it needs to be much lower, 200x is plenty enough, and the money saved needs to be redistributed at the 4x, 6x, 10x and 25x prizepools which you would see every day.
I'm sure it's been said before but I wanted to look at some numbers to see if they bore these claims out, and it turns out the numbers are probably more terrifying that most people thought