You aren't buying 10% of someone's action, you are getting 10% of whatever that person cashes for from PokerShares. Otherwise you are correct on your pricing.

-BD

That was the original premise of Bank of Timex but it turned out that wasn't legal without a sportsbook license. Yes you can try to undercut PokerShares but you also have to find someone who was ready to place that bet and do it on the side in a grey (black?) market with you. Also they would have to be confident that you can pay them out if a major payout happens (say Kevin Hart cashes the main for $5M and someone bought 10% for $800, are they confident of getting paid $500K from Joe Shmoe?

-BD

you know what's interesting? Even if you lived until 150, at your current post rate you'd still only be up to about 16 posts

nice first post 8 years in the making

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.

This was a quality post, thanks SageDonkey.

Thank you

Maria Ho lmfao

I like you Fedor, but lay off the coco mayne

Some extra factors on markups being as high as 4.3 for the ME.....

Other things to add regarding ~4.0 MUs is that the seller is selling (taking on) what is called in financial markets, "tail risk", as shown here http://lionscrestcapital.com/tail-risk.html

That is to say that a player's one off tournament result can reach the far point of the tail causing an extreme result well away from their expected result, which can obviously happen in a huge field.

E.g. Adrian Mateos is probably really worth ~2.8 (an expectation of cashing on average for $28,000 in the ME) but the "tail" extreme result is $8.8M, so Pokershares are marking his price up to 4.3 for assuming the extra tail risk.

(Because it is impossible for Pokershares to sell a decent proportion of the field for a huge number of runners event they will be adding "tail" premium to virtually all players' MUs)

There is also a demand and scarcity factor being that Pokershares only have buyers and where else can someone buy a piece of Mateos in the ME? There will only be buyers so the seller may as well puff the price up as far as they can while still attracting buyers.

All of this means that nearly all buyers from Pokershares for the ME were paying over the top prices.

In financial markets, traded options for example, there is a way to buy expensive bets in order to profit when an extreme event happens but at a lower or fairer overall price/cost. It is to buy twice or three times as many tail options as you sell of tail options, with the ones bought being further out on the tail and the ones you sell being slightly nearer the middle of the curve. They are both overpriced, due to added tail premium, but you are buying numerically lower priced ones and selling the numerically higher priced ones which keeps your net cost down.

This would be the equivalent in the ME of buying 5 (less) overpriced players at 2.3 MU and selling 2 (more) overpriced players at 4.3. You have net bought 3 players at 0.97 each. The obvious flaw in this is of course that the results of the 5 players you have bought are hardly related at all to the 2 players you sold, whereas in financial market traded options your buy and sell bets all have a very close correlation, or at least will behave fairly similarly in the event of extreme market results.

However, if you have deep enough pockets to assume the risk for the buy 5, sell 2 players method in the ME and you have properly identified who is cheap and who is expensive, relative to each other, then it is a winning play.

Just *buying* a basket of players who are all over priced is a losing play.

Quick somebody get Fedor in some fantasy sports leagues. We have the next EDog in our ranks.

Maria Ho decent troll

Fedor didnt win a tourney in a couple months, anyone think the game passed him by?

She puts herself in the public eye. Anyone who does that picks up idiot haters here.

You could argue for others to be ahead of her, but derision is just stupid. A glance at her Hendon Mob results will show that she has quite a few decent deep runs in the Main and other big live tournaments.

Yeah, out of date and confirmed busto (lol)