interested to see what the community thinks of this article, which was published today:

http://regressing.deadspin.com/why-i...5/+pokermutant

looks like a really long way of saying:

cliffs
Phil Hellmuth is the greatest tournament player ever to play the game. The numbers dont lie. Haters are just an added testament to his success.

Playing exclusively MTTs is for the insane.

Playing exclusively live MTTs is for the insane and extremely lucky.

A few holes in logic being used here.

The article talks about doing a full schedule of dailies then builds an argument around stats from Hendon Mob. I have won & cashed in dailies yet when I look up my hendon mob there is only one tourney listed on there. That means the author is building his argument around an incomplete database. How does he talk about doing dailies then make an argument that totally ignores players that do?

The article states that there are 77k players on hendon mob and only about 400 have made over $300k. Then the article says that to make $60k you have to cash for about $300k. This was derived from using internet poker results from one player. lolsamplesize and the competition at a $150 online tourney is not the same as a live $150 tourney so deriving a live ROI from internet results does not work.

BTW, saying .5% (400 out of 77k) of poker players make $60k doesn't really tell us much unless we define what a poker player is. Because part of that 77k are recreational players that play 4 tourneys a year. To factor recreational players into this equation skews it quite a bit.

We are also ignoring all non-casino live MTT which in many cases is liking asking a server how much money they make a year and not counting their tips.

Live tournaments were never beatable for a living wage.

Several flaws in the writers logic with this argument. I will write a long post about it later when I'm not on my phone.

It would become unfair to sellers for investors in mp to solely use this data to determine package value leading to this year's WSOP.

Sent from my SCH-I535 using 2+2 Forums

Pretty much this...

I wouldn't say those are flaws in the logic at all. Perhaps his count of how many players successfully make a $60K profit is off by an incomplete database, but the basic math of how much volume you must do to make $X profit at Y% ROI, and how realistic those values are, sounds pretty basic to me.

Yes but If you were Phil Ivey right now you could hang up your tournament career and never play again and your 3.75 mill up.

Of course we know this won't happen and hell prob degen it away. But just saying...

Phil hellmuth was right all along!

But how much did he lose?

Pretty sure anyone halfway decent could manage ~$600-700 average buy in, >200 tournaments a year, and a 30%+ ROI.

The issue is who has a 200k bankroll and wants to pursue an endeavor where you can have 5 year losing streaks.

A good online player with the same size bankroll would probably have an hourly over $200. Of course they don't get to play in the softest format of poker that exist.

i thought the whole reason people play tournaments was to get sponsorships.

yep

HOLY UNDERWEAR! We must protect our phoney baloney markups, gentlemen we have to do something about this immediately before marketplace looks at those charts.

HARUMPH HARUMPH HARUMPH

lol two wsop sample size for random group of 100 players some of whom are good regs and some of whom are bad regs

that said, playing live tournaments for a living on a non seven figure bankroll is lol because of the swings/expenses involved

mixing live mtts into an online schedule is fine though

Article is right for 99.999% of people. Get real jobs, you bums!

This article is WAY off.

While it is very difficult to make a living at tournament poker, the way this article cherry picks statistics to make a point is way off.

There is NO WAY that a top notch player only has a 10% ROI in WSOP events ( this excludes players playing multiple events at once, or games they are bad at while chasing bracelets).

I am not on the list due to not enough events, but looking at my WSOP statistics since 2005, for over 150 events, shows an ROI of over 100% and a profit even if you removed my largest cash of 1.276 MM.

Having problems with pulling up some older records, but I am going to compile an exact set of WSOP soon and will post here when finished.

So making a decent living playing live tournaments is very difficult? Only the very best players and some very lucky amateurs have a chance to prosper playing live tournaments? Isn't this what most of the "old pros" have said many times before? Play Tournaments for fun, play cash to make money.

I'm not using stats entirely rom Hendon Mob. HM doesn't track entries, which makes a determination of ROI impossible.

The live ROI stat derived from WSOP data is considerably lower than the online stats I've looked at. I used Chris Moorman's online stats as an example, not my sole data point.

The size/buyin/prizepool of non-casino MTTs is usually smaller than those run in casinos. Living in Portland, I'm pretty familiar with those.

My dataset for the WSOP is 8,000 entries and 136 players. There are going to be outliers on the high side of the curve—the players who make one or more final tables, people who are consistently making deep runs—in terms of individual ROI, but there are going to be others on the bottom side who are losing players.

that was the impression I got.

Aren't most professionals backed who play for a living or at least sell pieces of the buy in?

Lol sample size
Lol donkaments