Hey, curious to hear about people's experience/opinions on live tourney regs. I find it kind of fascinating that people do it and often wonder even for very good players how that can be the choice to make for what to play. And when I say live tourney regs I mean the guy who 90% of his volume each year is just traveling around to different events playing the main events and some sides. Maybe they play a tiny bit of cash on the side to smooth things out a little but for the most part they are grinding out tourney stops. Obviously a lot of these guys are buried in makeup/expenses but I know some smart players who still do it. I would imagine for it to have a chance to be worth it you would need to have the bankroll to be keeping the vast majority of your action in all the main events during these stops right? Obviously we are ignoring the small field huge buyin people as that makes a lot more sense from a cost/benefit sense. Wouldn't taxes and the travel expenses make this unattractive for most people, and then throw in pretty rough variance and no chance of being able to play any kind of meaningful volume per year even if playing tons of stops? Can some of these good live tourney grinders get in 1mill of buyins a year and print a 50% evroi and have a decent chance of realizing that ev?

I'd be curious as well to hear from Live tourney regs who actually make a decent living.

I honestly think the number of traveling tourney regs who make a living is insanely small. We could debate ROI and what it could be in a soft tourney, but if you start crunching numbers and someone is traveling to play a $5,000 buy-in. If they have a 20% ROI, they make on average $1,000. How many people spend less on flight, hotel and meals when they travel for a tournament? Unless you are staying in really cheap hotels (Can you find hotels for under $100 in most places) and you eat ramen noodles, you are burning money.

Obviously this doesn't apply to those who bink a main event or who play high roller tournaments. I honestly think it's not feasible to travel and play poker full time unless you have an insane ROI.

I have heard of some live regs who live in vegas and play a lot of the Venetian Deep Stack tournaments, WSOP, etc. and put in the volume and can make a good living. But I think a lot are just riding the wave of variance.

If you are talking about those with $1 million of buy-ins and have greater than 50% ROI, that number is probably a handful of players. How many players have greater than $1.5 million of cashes in a single year that don't play super high rollers? Year after year?

I think the vast majority of pros are playing online as well or playing live cash

Seems like a really bad idea to try to rely exclusively on live MTTs for a living. ROIs are insane live but your volume will be so low that the chance of realizing your $EV in any given year is still quite small. Travelling expenses and taxes are another huge hurdle. Honestly if I had to put my money down I'd wager almost all these "live pros" are dead broke and living from day to day.

If you want to go the live route cash games are surely a better way to do it.

Agreed. But there are for sure people doing it and I know at least a few who are smart people and so far have been successful doing it. To be clear I personally agree with you and would never have any interest in doing it myself. But it's interesting imo. I've tried thinking about the number myself but it's hard because I don't really know what a solid live tourney regs yearly volume and achievable ROI is. If anyone with more knowledge can speak on that it'd be interesting to hear. Like can someone reasonably expect to play 1mill in buyins at a 50% ROI if they are traveling around most of the year and playing a handful of the good side events and the main event of each stop?

Almost all the high roller guys are heavily backed and those who aren't have rarely made their bankroll playing poker in recent years. Also in smaller games backer is a must for most people. If a player has enough bankroll to play live up to 10k buyin, they also have enough money that the annual investment profit should be close to poker profit, thus they naturally have at least 2 income streams. Also there are events and locations that allow playing more than one tournament per day and for all non-highrollers that is more relevant than the size of buyin when choosing traveling locations. For most players their ROI is significantly better in smaller buyins and reduction of variance makes it worthwhile to travel for many small buyns instead of few big ones.

The first person that come to mind would be Allen Kessler. But surely he has been profitable since he's been playing live tournaments? However in one of his packages, someone mentioned how he is not a winning player. If thats the case, how would he have the money for expenses then? I know players would sell at markup but even the markup they charge, it does't even seem like its enough to overcome the expenses.


Also what about someone like Dan Heimiller or Eric Baldwin? All these guys seem to be vegas live regs and have pretty decent scores. Also isn't Jeff Boski mostly a live mtt pro? He does play online a bit on wpn but not that much but his channel is nice.