Hi!

Is playing satelites good bankroll management?

For example:

Say I have $200 on my bankroll. Is it good BRM to play a $0.50 satelite to an $11 buy-in tourney?

As playing a $0.50 tourney would be good BRM. But paying $11 to play a tourney would not be.

If you have a budget, do what you like

If you are actually trying bankroll management then it's effectively still just a 50 cent spend, albeit one with a massively smaller ROI and increased variance, and if you can't gauge whether you're a winning player at the $11 level then you shouldn't be satting into $11 tournaments

Alright thanks! So it is theoretically good BRM, but in practice satelites will rarely give us a good ROI.

Then I have another question. When is it a good idea to play a satelite?

To play a wsop main event sat not from a financial point of view because its best to just pay the 10 large to buy-in but to do it on the cheap in a once a year event where your budget/bankroll doesn't allow for 10 grand buy-ins.

Have you ever played in one? The $1.1k mega sat might be the softest 1-day $1k+ in the world that runs on a regular basis. There are plenty of people who play those over the regular $1-1.5k WSOP events because their ROI is higher. Especially in the couple days right before the ME.

Since the lammers you win can be sold, you're still effectively making the decision to drop $10K on the ME. You can still say, "screw BRM. This is a once per year chance to play in a soft $10k." It could be that you're ++EV in the $1.1k, so that even a smaller roll can play them with reasonable RoR. If that's even an issue, you're under-rolled for the ME. Still, at that point you aren't having a serious BRM discussion. You're just gambling with a hoped for edge. If you've had a decent summer, you could decide removing these chunks of cash won't make you homeless. We're back to affording.

Have a friend who is a SNG pro. I assume that the best 6 weeks of his year comes from people who have no business playing large buy-in STTs with pros like him.

This statement can't be true, except for people with huge bankrolls. If your return on investment is low, you'll need a huge roll. I think another way to put this is that the satty itself could a good investment. The result is that you have to play a bigger tournament. If you aren't +EV in that tournament, you end up with problems. Even if you have an edge in that tournament, you're going to cash pretty rarely. As someone who is concerned about BRM in the smaller sats, you're clearly not rolled for the bigger tournament you just won an entry to. Compared to your normal stakes, the swings in the bigger buy-in are HUGE. Then the question comes down to, "do you care about bankroll in $0.50 entries?"

Always thought about this with the old steps tournaments. Let's say you're a pro at higher stakes. How happy are you that all of the guys 3 or 4 levels down pool their money and send a random player up to play you? Assume you're pretty happy to have low micros guys in your games. As a $0.50 player, how happy are the $11 guys to have you show up in their game?

No I haven't.

on a similar note I do know guys who win multiple sat's into the aussie millions 10k main event so playing those sats might be profitable. But these players would play the main anyways but play the sats because maybe like you said they are profitable and they seem to be for them. But to play a sat and try and play the main with your satty entry is higher risk than if you just brought in to the main. Plus your paying more in rake.

Thanks for the responses guys. Going to avoid satelites unless I win a ticket in a giveaway or something.

Guessing here.. but I guess in theory you'd just multiply the odds of cashing the satellite to your regular BR management. If you estimate to cash the satellite one out of 7 times, and you normally follow 100 buyins, you'll need 700 buyins for the satellite you're playing - so 350 dollars for a 50 cents satellite.

Seems nitty haha, but I guess another advantage of that is to not play scared money once in the tournament. because it is not too far out of your roll to begin with. Glgl