Hello guys,

I've been thinking about which format makes you inherently pay the most rake, and thus assuming everything else equal, should be tougher to beat.

I have basically tried to compare expected returns vs expected rake you're going to pay in that process.

Let's look at microstakes for example (cash game ~ NL10 and tournament buy-ins < 5$)

Cash games:
This website (https://www.primedope.com/online-pok...ke-calculator/) shows that you're going to pay an average of 9bb of rake, or around 5% of the pots you win.
As for winrate, it seems like 5bb/100 of net profits is a reasonable target for this stakes.
So you're going to pay almost twice your expected profit in rake.

Tournaments
Where I play, tournament fee (rake) at these stakes is 10% of BuyIn. It was tougher to find industry averages.
Now for the winrate, the ROI targets I've seen seem to aim between 10-20% for something reasonable.
So here, you are actually paying less rake than the amount of money you expect to make.

Am i right to conclude that the rake in MTTs format is less punishing, and thus easier to beat (not considering variance, field level etc) ?

Or am I thinking about this the wrong way ? It could also be that these expected profit rates I've gathered are simply off.

Curious to hear your thoughts.

Thx a lot!
Nemo.

Those tournament ROIs come with a much larger delta of variance so they need to be taken with a huge grain of salt. The variance of tournaments is orders of magnitude higher than cash.

It should also be looked at from the casinos perspective. Big tournaments make all of the poker higher ups lots of money, but it is the daily grind of raking cash games that keep the lights on and the poker room open. Very few (if any?) poker rooms could exist on tournaments only. Too hard to schedule dealers and other basic stuff like that.

Rake from cash games are needed to keep the poker economy going. If no one plays cash games because of the rake imbalance, poker dies.

What you're saying makes sense, variance is obviously different.

How much is the tournament fee usually for Big Live tournaments ?
If they are indeed so hard to organize, I would think the rake would be higher than cash games to compensate for that organization effort.

But for online at least, the companies are indifferent between cash and tournaments, so I was curious to find out if one is tougher to beat.

In cash games through heavy volume you can profit every month. In MTTs someone like All In Pav who is constantly working on his game and won for years has no profit on ACR in the last 3 years of massive amount of volume. The problem with mtts is you can downswing for years and most players end up going broke from breaking even or losing for to long. The real winning strategy is to profit in cash games and to use a percentage of your winnings to play a few mtts every day. So you get a steady profit and bang for your buck if you do get lucky in mtt.

I think for live tourneys, most casinos tray them as a loss leader to attract players into the room. They figure only a relatively small percentage of players will be in the tournament the whole way to the wnd and that those players who bust out early are likely to stick around and play cash games (or leave the poker room but play slots or table games).