Hate this thinking because people should play to win. The 1st-2nd gap should always be significantly more than 2nd to 3rd. I don't mind flat payouts except they always give 2nd too much.

Except for the absurd structure of the One Drop, I actually think that overall, the WSOP payout structures are pretty good, particularly compared to how they used to be, and how they continue to be in a lot of other tournaments. If anything, they should be paying a little less to both the bottom and the top of the structure, and more to the middle (e.g. the person who finished 100th place in the Main Event.)

Good post.
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Nice try OP, but as others have already said, the sample size is way too small to be meaningful.
Stirred up a decent discussion though!

No wonder Arieh decided to quit I mean "retire" from poker.

29 events
2 cashes
-132k
find a new hobby

Good staking deals/swaps......means convincing a huge poker site to pay you a multi million dollar salary and pay for all your tourney fees and you get to keep a profit. The middle tier MTT players from the boom have dropped like flies the past few years, even some top online MTT players. Circuit grind isn't a joke.

I'm not sure about the robustness of this data, does the 30.65% take into account White Magic?

Op what was my roi excluding the $50k?

If you include the 1MM buy in it kicks the Grinder down a little but still in profit but puts RealKidPoker and Durrr the bottom bottom.. Sorry bros! Your still greats in my book.

The gap from 1 to 2 was considerably larger 20 years ago so I don't think we should complain about that.

OP, while you're at it, can you tell me what the square root of 36 is?

A winner-take-all payout results in the maximum ROI for skilled players. Yet virtually noone would advocate that as player fields would likely be reduced by 90%+

A balance needs to be struck. While payouts have become flatter in general in recent years, there is still room for more to reach the optimum level. We are not there yet.

Give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, feed him for life. How about I give you the formula for ROI and you can learn how to do it yourself.

A mathematical formula is used to calculate the gaps between all payout jumps. But then the formula is thrown out for the gap between 1st and 2nd and it is replaced by an arbitray ratio of 1.61- the "golden ratio", as if that has some special significance. It doesn't.

The result is the payout between 1st and 2nd is unusually large. Considering 40%+ of key hands at final table that result in a win are due to bad beats, why should luck be rewarded even more than it already is. Also, the bracelet alone is worth a great deal and likely valued at a minimum of 100k to anyone winning over 500k.
(ie most, if given a choice, would rather choose to win and get 500k + bracelet, rather than 2nd and 600k)

Yes, I know that. Applying standards of what "should" be to the main is super arbitrary. It's all life changing money anyway, might as well heap a ****load to first to attract big headlines and lots of fish, or don't, I really don't care.

Flatter structures are almost always better for the players, but while online casinos care about protecting player longevity, tournament stops don't. People are gonna come play regardless, and there isn't as much of an economy to consider since there is such low churn, and most places only host one series per year. That's why stars has super flat structrures, and live events (except those run by stars) generally don't.

It sucks that WSOP won't facilitate deal making like the EPT does, though.

Hey IhateJJ, could u do me a big favor an put this excel sheet on Google Docs or send it to me by mail?

I only asked since he'd already done the work excluding the $50k.

The data I get from the WSOP is a mess. I have a script that does some error checking for me to resolve spelling errors and location errors that cause the data to be split under different player IDs. I'll do my best to get this all resolved in the next day or so.

Fixed

This. It's completely absurd.

The spreadsheet is now up on Google Docs. Have fun with it.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/...XJBTHRmNTBzSUE

FYI I actually had 2 cashes not 1 (16th in 5k O8). Not a huge difference but it compounds if there are a bunch of similar mistakes across the board.

This data is about as meaningful as a steaming pile of horse **** and just as interesting

That said, good work OP

I used the hendon mob data base for results. Several players had multiple profiles, either with different spellings of their name, different home towns, etc. I did my my best to pick them all up, but in your case you had two different home towns and i missed one. Your cashes should be greater by $13,031. I dont think its a pervasive problem, but as i said initially, i crunched these numbers manually so there might be some small errors.

P.S. congrats on a successful series.

Not sure why people keep saying this because it's not true.

Dude you are awesome! thanks so much!

[ ] stats PhDs ITT
any data can be considered significant depending on the level of significance you define to be satisfactory.

1st of all it'd be nice to see what sort of distributions we are dealing with. One should calculate the kurtosis to see the tail, shoulder, and center are distributed. This can show us numerically how much extreme values have on the distribution of the normal curve. I'm sure people who have done analysis on MTT data before already have all the answers to this.

This is a good reading on kurtosis: http://www.columbia.edu/~ld208/psymeth97.pdf

While this one on variance requires a statistical background, specifically in regression analysis: http://www.stat.ncsu.edu/people/davi...otes/chap7.pdf Easier to understand on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heteroscedasticity A lot of statistical assumptions rely on a constant variance. Conditional Heteroskedasticity could possibly be applicable to the swings one experiences in poker.

There is a lot you can do with the data beyond simply looking at ROI or figuring out the var.