Yea.... Pudge covers why this doesn't make any sense.
We should start a new thread called "Greenwood Brothers Disprove Derek8's Asinine Theories"

useless without pictures of brotherly love and derek8s asininity

my personal struggles in mtts lately inspired me to do some research, and this thread seems like as good a place as any to share what i found. i took the p5s rankings from just over a year ago and looked up those 93.5 players' 2009 ROIs on stars and tilt (a few people were blocked or didn't have SNs listed, no big deal). obv the p5s rankings aren't anywhere near an accurate reflection of the best tourney players, but they do provide a decent sample size of people who can mostly be considered at least adequate tourney pros.

of the 93.5 people (mrcasino is the .5 since stars banned him iirc), only eight had ROIs of 50%+ on both sites. ten had negative ROIs on both sites, which really shocked me. 47/187 ROIs i looked at were in the red. in the rankings' top thirty, eleven people's ROIs were below 30% on both sites. the average ROI on stars was 31.3% and 30% on tilt. the mean (which is a much better measure for this study imo) on each site was 24.5% and 19%.

there are probably a lot of conclusions to be drawn from all these numbers, none more obvious than the fact that i need to find better things to do with my free time. also, variance is absurd in mtts and the games are only getting tougher. if a typical solid online mtt pro's true ROI is somewhere between 20-25%, even those people who reach a million in buyins each year are only taking home 200-250k in equity while playing absurd hours. throw in the fact that a large percentage of those 93.5 people are backed, and you're looking at some of the most productive online mtt pros taking home a little more than 100k in equity each year (obv this doesn't include any live poker calculations). in today's economy, that's a pretty sweet deal for playing a card game... but i'm pretty sure that the majority of those people could focus on cash, keep 100% of their profits and make a better living down the road. with that said, most tourney players (myself included unfortunately) enjoy mtts more than other forms of poker despite the soul crushing variance and will keep grinding away hoping to run like pikappraider someday.

fwiw, the eight people with 50%+ on both sites this year are moorman, gboro, ender, below, titantom, belabasci, believer82 and hoodini. the people with negative ROIs on both sites (not gonna list them) are an obviously less impressive group of players, but mostly people who are considered to be decent, winning regs in the long run.

pix never work for me

you know i hear HSNL short stacking can be quite profitable

middle ground?

lol, people had 500k/year expectation at 2-4 NL during those years, all you had to do was wait to flop sets and go all in to make money...

Hey man, no reason to get personal.

bmf823 thanks for sharing that info, awesome idea imo.
One thing I think is worth mentioning though is that pocketfives top 100 list isn't a list of the 100 best mtt players, the 100 most winning mttplayers, the 100 hardest grinding mtt players etc. Its just a list of the 100 mttplayers who grind most highstakes tournies.

So many of the players on that list only plays the biggest and most expensive mtts online in fields where they either have a very small edge (if any) or sundaystuff with enormous fields. As a result it's pretty easy for a lot of those players to have a losing year on a certain sites. Also a lot of the people on that list are people who might have binked a huge score and is slowly giving it back or someone that Sheets hasn't realized are terrible yet etc.

I guess the point i'm trying to make is that if you are any good at mtts at all you can chose to play lower variance tournies where you are 99% guaranteed to make a nice profit by the end of the year. Now if you rather wanna play every 100r/1k/10k wsop I totally understand that too, the reward is much greater if you do good. But if you are in 400-500k makeup after a couple of years you have absolutely no right to complain imo.

how do people get hundreds K's in makeup?? I just don't get it.

Yeah, cool post, bmfmf.

i agree with almost all of this, except your 99% estimate is probably closer to 90%. you'd be surprised at some of the good grinders with over 2k tourneys on one site alone with a single digit roi this year.

this has been covered ad nauseam, but people who play big live events regularly get to six figures routinely, and people who play exclusively online with a high ABI can get to six figures without doing anything wrong. i dunno if 200k+ online is within the range of normal variance, although i'd be shocked if there aren't a few very good players who've gotten to that number.

I can agree playing 10K live events or even 5K events. But I just don't see how this is possible playing good mtt poker online.

i've been on a 200k downer online, rly easy when you don't cash the super tuesday 42 times in a row and final table the 100r once in a year

derek8

stopped after reading this

tournaments are just so damn fun though!

so is heroin while you're doing it

I really wonder how many full time online grinders last more than 3-5 years before burning out?? You see so many online grinders vanish into thin air year after year, but to see Deeb possibly do the same is unimaginable, makes me really think poker is best when played for pure entertainment purposes rather than for a living, because once it goes from "hobby" to living it seems inevitable that there will be a crash and burn at some point. At any rate, gl Shaun, hope to see you back at it in 2010, gg sir!!

Interesting stuff bmf, thanks for digging that up. I would definitely have guessed at more than 8 with 50% ROI on both, and average ROI much higher than 25%. To an extent it's difficult to post high ROI when you're mass-multitabling. I can only guess but I think I would have to play maybe 4x the tournaments to make 2x the total $ at the end of the year. FYI I had a look at a few stats (nowhere near as many as bmf) and Moorman has played about 4.5x more tournaments for about 3x the money (compared to me).

Also having read that I don't feel so bad about languishing in the 400s on p5s

Edit : I didn't realise that you took the rankings from a year ago and then checked 2009 ROI. That's the smart way of doing it. When talking about guesses above I was assuming current rankings.

wow I haven't seen this thread until now. Hope you will come back when you feel better.

Thanks for posting that analysis bmf, lot's of valuable info!

Who knows, when I have a peaceful soul and few minutes at hand, I might even make a serious reply to this thread myself...

Just a few questions regarding 6 figure winners in MS cash vs MTTs.

Obviously money in the poker economy flows upwards. When you move up in stakes the average ability of the player pool moves in the same direction in varying degrees. It is also obvious that there exist more losers then winners at all levels.

Let L(ms)= total loses at MS cash
L(mtt)= total loses at MTTs
MS cash "on average" in theory can only be more profitable then MTTs if L(ms)>L9(mtt)

Are people really losing more money at MS cash then MTTs? Or is the edge of an excellent MS cash player over the player pool just that much bigger an excellent MTTer's edge over their player pool? Given that real WR converges on expected WR in the long for both samples.

Good idea learning cash by starting at high stakes instead of working your way up

499th.

500nd