If you use the double up model to calculate ROI, here is some data from the 2010 main event.
If you were to go allin as an average 54.47% favorite, you would win the event 4x as often as an average player who gets it allin at a 50% rate. With a
4x chance of winning, your ROI would be 80%.



2010 Main Event $10,000 NL Holdem

All in % 7319 Players ROI
50.00% Average Player -6%
52.77% 2x Average Player 41%
54.47% 3x Average Player 80%
55.70% 4x Average Player 117%


However, it gets discouraging if you never have a top 36 finish.
Here is your expected ROI fi you never have any top finishes as an average player:
Average Player ROI If :
No Top 3 Finishes -19%
No Top 9 Finishes -38%
No Top 18 Finishes -44%
No Top 27 Finishes -46%
No Top 36 Finishes -49%


Here is your expected ROI if you never have any top finishes as a 2x player:

2x Average Player ROI If:
No Top 3 Finishes 16%
No Top 9 Finishes -17%
No Top 18 Finishes -27%
No Top 27 Finishes -31%
No Top 36 Finishes -34%

Here it is for a 3x player:
3x Average Player ROI If:
No Top 3 Finishes 45%
No Top 9 Finishes -1%
No Top 18 Finishes -15%
No Top 27 Finishes -19%
No Top 36 Finishes -24%

Here it is for a 4x player:
4x Average Player ROI If:
Actual
No Top 3 Finishes 70%
No Top 9 Finishes 12%
No Top 18 Finishes -5%
No Top 27 Finishes -10%
No Top 36 Finishes -16%

So even if you are 3x more likely to win the main due to skill, with an overall ROI of 80%, your ROI will be -24% if you never finish in the top 36.

Now how often can a 3x player make the top 36 out of a 7319 player field?:
Once every 105 years! This from the table below:

How often in years of expected finishing positions:
7319 Players Top 3 Top 9 Top 18 Top 27 Top 36
Average Player 2440 813 407 271 203
2x Average Player 1329 482 255 175 134
3x Average Player 931 356 194 136 105
4x Average Player 723 286 159 113 89


Even a 4x player will only make the top 36 once every 89 years on average!
A 2x player will make the final table once every 482 years on average.

One way to make tournament play better is to lower the variance by both reducing the top payouts and expanding the number paid from 10% to say 12.5% of the field. I will show why this makes sense in a later post.

or http://wsopdb.com/

oops, must read better. They don't hire decent dealers, because they won't pay us enough. So just where is the money going??

lol expected live pro hourly

My suggestion would be that the rake needs to vary in proportion to the quality of the field, tournament NL is close to a solved game, and everyone shares the formula, so raking the entrants in that game at the same rate it was 20 years ago, and the same as a Razz e.g. or a mixed game tournament is raked is just robbery.

For poker to continue to thrive (or even survive), the Harrahs et al need to seek their profits from sponsors, and think of the professional players more as employees.

Good stuff, thanks OP.

Yeah not to mention that as a staker you don't need to pay for travel and accommodations, or if you do, it's not really a factor if you have many horses.

Pardon me if I'm stating the obvious, but after travel and taxes 30% seems terrible, amirite?

Translation: "Please include tournies where I did better. O, and also please help me deal with the vultures."

I agree, but then again I came to the conclusion that most of the money in poker is in the "industry" and not in actually playing some time ago. It's hard to think of another profession that statistically has as much risk and as little reward as poker does.. maybe FX trading is comparable, with its high fees (rake) and massive variance. In general, the sites/casinos/brokers/affiliates are the ones making the money.

so in other words: tournament markup is a bunch of bull****.

wow...so many good players with nothing but losses. Everyday i am more convinced that tourneys are like the fckn lottery

because they were drafted in the $25K Fantasy League, thus included in the player pool in my spreadsheet, but they did not play any events at the 2012 WSOP. (bad draft choices I guess..)

Well done sir!

Making conclusive statements based on a sample size of tournaments from one years WSOP.. hmm... yeah, seems intelligent. 600% ROI is sustainable.

ben lamb played only 4 events? defending POY? that cant be right

yes it is. he prefers cash just like the vast majority of all pros. and he only played like 6 events last year that's why his POY was so sick

shouldnt there be a movement to restructure tourney payouts to be less fiscally variant. i.e. pay out 20%, take a bunch of 1st-3rd money to the whole final table.

OP, anyway you can post this somewhere as a spreadsheet rather than an image? I would be interested in stats like avg cash %, avg buy-in, etc.

Entry fees were 10% in the $1,500's, and was less as buy-in amount rose. I think the $10Ks were 6% (?). Anyway, it means Harrah's raked something between 2nd and 3rd place money in every bracelet event.

If the payouts were stretched to top 20% finishers, intuitively it seems like Harrahs would "win" lots more than 1st place money.

If you actually have a 30% ROI, you can certainly make a living playing tournament poker....you just need to swap/buy/sell enough pieces with other 30% ROI players to sufficiently reduce you variance. If all these players had swapped evenly 88-ways, they would have each made 35k over 6 weeks.

Not saying that the real numbers are any higher, but fwiw this isn't anywhere close to long term data.

1. This is such a small sample size of data it's essentially still almost completely meaningless. It's what, somewhere in the neighborhood of 1500 tournaments total? The standard deviation for a given player's ROI over an infinite set of 1500 tournament samples is absolutely tremendous.

2. The data is heavily biased towards players that play small, tough fields, and play mixed games with fewer fish

3. The data is heavily biased towards players that are going to play tons of events rather than players that are going to have the highest rois in the events that they do play. The draft is such that a slightly losing mixed game player who is gonna grind really hard is a much better draft pick than someone like westmenlo or gboro who are gonna play fewer tourneys and mostly large field nlhe stuff. It's a bit misleading to title this results for "Top Players," even though there is a lot of overlap with this list and a list of top players.

4. Several players on this list multi table events or blind out of events without playing a hand and during the series play to maximize bracelet equity rather than ROI.


Again, lol sample size, but kudos for the effort. Doing this year after year for a decade might tell us something meaningful, and we can also extrapolate some reasonable estimates from cash %s and things like that which the data can demonstrate much more conclusively than ROI.