Quote:
Originally Posted by robert_utk
So, did any of these recommended bets turn a profit?
According to the official results here
http://www.wsop.com/tournaments/results/ none of them cashed.
The problem with these bets was not the actual picks as such, I'm sure Fedor knows far more than most of us about who is a skillful tournament player, but the big premiums he paid.
And once you start buying a basket of players all at a premium you are in effect backing against yourself, similar to the worst roulette strat players in the world who cover ~2/3rds of the board with their bets. The more board coverage you have, the lower your leverage becomes and the house's risk lessens, and their edge becomes more certain in that particular isolated spin (or in this particular WSOP ME)
So by buying a group of players all at chunky premiums was to some degree Fedor backing against himself, plus was definitely vastly reducing the leverage on his total stake.
The bigger the basket of players you buy all at a premium, the more you are partly backing against yourself.
As a general rule of thumb (I cannot declare why I have an enormous amount of knowledge on this) all players should trade somewhere between 0.6 (so at a discount) and 2.8 in almost any tournament, and to be a buyer at over 2.2 you need to have some very solid and well thought out reasons to justify it.
You should also take into account the juice, most people don't, because it is naturally adding ~10% of premium for the buyer and is conversely ~10% in favour of the seller.
The only close to accurate way of correctly pricing up a player in the field is to price up *all* players in the field, account for juice when doing so, and make sure that the total aggregate mark up/mark down figures of all players is equal to the number of players in the field, less the adjustment for juice.
When you do this you will soon realise that a lot of players should be priced under par, and that not very many players should be over 2.0 and only a tiny amount should be over 2.5.
Clearly all of these calculations should take into account other factors such as the tournament structure but it is the only way of correctly pricing players and certainly how the likes of Pokershares are doing it.
Also, in such huge fields Pokershares have a great chance of cleaning up because the variance in a huge field means that there can often be one or more "skinner" who win the event or take some of the bigger cashing places and whom Pokershares did not sell a bean of, most likely because it was an unknown or unfancied/unfashionable player or players who were not even quoted on the list of player prices.
Last edited by SageDonkey; 07-13-2018 at 11:40 AM.
Reason: Added some info