Quote:
Originally Posted by BillyBizzle
As such, all of your mincashes have to come from somewhere. Below are the rough differences between the London prizepool from the Montreal one.
Those differences, though, are a result of choices on how to draw the payout curve, not because they're paying out fewer spots.
The math is pretty simple. If you have 1,000 entries contributing 5K each, and you pay 50 of them (5% of the players) 5K for a min-cash, that still leaves 950x5K for the prize pool, or 4,750,000 euros, dollars or whatever.
If you have two identical payout curves, then add min-cashes to one of them, yes, you do have to take the money from somewhere, but it only needs to reduce the payouts by 5% IF YOU USE THE SAME CURVE. If you use some arbitrary curve , then you get some other result. That's a choice, not a result of min-payouts.
Payout structures evolve over the years. In 2003, the WSOP Main Event only paid 7% of the field. The next year, it was up to almost 9%, but only the top 3% got more than 2x their buyin.