So my local casino Turning Stone has a 1000GTD tournament every Tuesday night with a 9+3+3 buyin, so 6 dollars in juice/tips. While this seems like a horrible waste of time/money I always find myself playing it just to get away from the cash tables for a couple hours. There is usually around 50-60 players and usually around 80-90 entries total with rebuys, so it is rare for it to actually hit the 1000GTD. Could this be +EV even with the ridiculous juice since the field is so weak and the overlay. No matter what it's 500 for 1st, 300 2nd, 200 3rd. Actually made the top three last night and we did a chop for around 333 each. Blinds were 10k-20k and no one really had more than 150k in chips, so figured the chop was a good idea.

You aren't allowed to call $6 juice ridiculous, regardless of what percentage it represents of the buy-in. Pretty tough to run an event and keep the lights on when the house makes $3/entry.

Is it a $12 or $15 rebuy/re-entry?

it is a 15 rebuy I'm pretty sure, I've never rebought in the 4 times I've played it. I'm not really complaining about the juice, just for the dealers they need to charge something. It's a good time and while when I play I try to make some extra cash to supplement my income, I still consider myself a rec player. So, I guess I kind of answered my own question because even for the good it can be +ev for me, but would it be lighting money on fire for someone trying to grind out a living.

Not for certain. It all depends on how much each entry cost, including the rebuys. In the houses' eyes, anything less than 111 entries is an overlay ($1000/$9), because they have to take money out of the house fee to meet the guarantee.

The breakeven point for the house is at 83.3 players ($1000/12), assuming they take the house fee out of rebuy/re-entires too. And that "breakeven" doesn't take into account the cost of beverages or labor.

The way I look at situations like this is by calculating the true Vig %. That is, what percentage of every buy-in is not going to the prize pool:

[Vig%] = [Fees]/[Buy-in]

Guarantees make that a sliding scale. For example:

@111 buy-ins the Vig% is 40%
1000 prize pool / 111 buy-ins = $9.01 to prize pool, $5.99 to fees

@85 buy-ins the Vig% is 21.6%
1000 prize pool / 85 buy-ins = $11.76 to prize pool, $3.24 to fees

@67 buy-ins the Vig% is .5%
1000 prize pool / 67 buy-ins = $14.93 to prize pool, $.07 to fees

At 66 players this thing is rake-free. As for the casino, even when they get less than 66 players they are still making money. If you look at the flyer for these things (https://www.turningstone.com/uploads...erschedule.pdf) you will see that $3 of those fees go to the promotional fund. If they don't hit the guarantee, that's where the difference is coming from. Every $1 they take from a pot towards the bad beat, doesn't always end up being paid out for a bad beat--they also end up here with the casino paying themselves back.

Ic, so the overlay is still coming from the cash games. Man that BBJ up there though, at over 400k.

After writing my post I started working the math and came up with a calculator to generate how a guarantee/overlay effects the rake. I put it up on my site here:

http://www.rainbowspuppiessunshine.c..****/overlay.php

Feed in the guarantee, buy-in and fees and you can find out where a guaranteed tournament becomes a good deal. Also, if you know the number of entries it will tell you exactly how that tournament breaks down.

In your example, I would argue that taking $25 out of $100 total buy-in is equivalent to a 25% rake?

I dont know where you got $100 total buy-in. My example on the site is pretty explicit, the total buy-in is $75. With $25 fees, that's a 33.3% rake.

Sorry my fault, I misread it. Carry on...