Quote:
Originally Posted by Greg (FossilMan)
When you get a chance, please explain the math of why my deal is bad, in your opinion. And so it can remain impersonal, imagine a player for whom you would pay a markup of 1.2 for a single event. If that player were offering my package, why would it be a bad deal? Why, mathematically, would you rather buy each event at 1.2 rather than buy in the manner I am offering?
Thanks for your honest input!
I'll take a shot here. Math included.
1. Ability to re-evaluate at any point. If someone plays 50 soft, reasonably small field tournaments and is losing, I'd not only not want to pay 1.2, I'd not buy at all.
2. There is a huge difference between 10% at 1.2 vs buying 80+% at 1.2. In the former case, the player is only +EV (after expenses) if he's beating the field. In the latter case, you're collecting enough markup to freeroll and can be profitable despite being a losing player. Your deal obviously isn't the same as this, but has some similar elements, but I'm not here to debate that -- just answering your question directly and completely.
3. You know exactly what you are buying and can decide for yourself if it's profitable. With this package, the investor has no idea a) which tournaments you'll play b) the average buy in c) the number of tournaments d) the average field size etc etc.
4. An investment with a very quick turnover (a few days) should require a lower return than one with a 1 year duration. Therefore, to invest in this package, it would have to be way way way more profitable than a 1.2 investment I can make that will be settled within a week.
I would say that there is a 0% chance this is a profitable investment if (theoretically) you played the 10k NLSD 10 times -- and I'm making this comment regardless of your skill level. Even if you were the best player in the field, this would be a horrible investment. Why?
Because poker tournaments are dependent on
power law returns. Depending on the payout structure (going to assume they pay between 10 and 16% of the field, and you cash slightly more than average), you'd go 0 for 10 somewhere around 20% of the time.** If you really toiled through the rest of the distribution, you would see this would be massively -EV even if you're decently +EV in the actual tournaments, as a result of carving out an outsized % of profits for yourself in upside cases.
There is a lot of debate and speculation in this thread about what your skill level is relative to the fields, but that is only one small piece of the puzzle. The rest of the puzzle is the volume that you'll put in, the quality of fields you'll play, the size of fields, and the payout structures. Volume is key for any staking deal. Any deal (only staked for cash games) I gave would have either a profit threshold or a volume (number of hands) threshold. Any other type of arrangement where you have little idea what the stakee is going to play makes very little sense -- the deal can be wildly +EV or horribly -EV depending on the volume/schedule. You shouldn't even be playing the WSOP main event on this deal, IMO.
**Let me illustrate with a toy game. Let's say you only play one type of tournament: an 20 man, $5000 buy in, winner take all tournament. Rake is 10%, so first gets $90,000 and no one else gets anything. You are so impossibly good that you win this tournament 7% of the time, which would give you an ROI of 26%. So what's the expected return of this package?
23.4% of the time you'd brick out and lose the entire bankroll.
35.26% of the time, you'd win exactly once, losing just rake (-10k). At this point you'd be able to re-invest in more tournaments, and there is a whole new tree in the calculation.
The other 41.3% of the time, you'd win 2 or more times. In these cases, you'd win an average of 128,119.
So what's the return on one cycle through the bankroll: .234*-100,000+.3526*-10,000+.4131*.6*128119 =~4800. On a 1 year investment of 100,000, 4.8% would be a miserable expected return, especially for an investment with such a risk profile. In addition to that, my assumptions about your ROI are extremely generous. I'll concede that most tournaments aren't only paying the top 5%, but this made the example easier to illustrate. Additionally, I did not bother calculating the sub-cases where you can continue to play more tournaments. But hopefully this goes to show that your intended schedule, volume, ABI, field sizes, and payout structures are extremely important considerations, especially for an investment with a long duration, and buying this package is akin to playing darts in a pitch black room. There is just no way to evaluate it without more information, but my intuition tells me it's a poor buy even if you're a solid winner.
I do think that you should provide more information and add some dis-incentives to playing lower volume or higher buy in events like the main and 10k NLSD that are clearly too big for this bankroll.
Last edited by Two SHAE; 01-04-2016 at 08:49 PM.