How To Evaluate Poker Tournaments for Maximum Profit - A starting point

How To Evaluate Poker Tournaments for Maximum Profit

First let me say that I am not an evangelist for Arnold Snyder and his books. But as a person always trying to learn more about my chosen profession I have to understand and internalize everything that I read about Poker to the point that it makes sense to me. So I present to the AVP community the following breakdown of three tournaments that we have been discussing.

The three tournaments I selected are:

• * 2010 WSOP Event #3 $1,000 buy-in (WSOP)
  
• * Golden Nugget Daily $105 buy-in (GN)
  
• * Venetian Deep Stack $340 buy-in (VDS)
  

The data I will be presenting here I offer in MS Excel format to anyone who requests it, just send me your email address. My purpose is to truly understand the best way to evaluate the local tournaments to maximize profits.

I have 4 different evaluations of the available data that I will present

• - Blind Off Rate
  
• - Big Blind Increase Percentage by Level
  
• - Relative M Over Time
  
• - M Relative to Starting Chips
  

Blind Off Rate

The blind off rate is the estimated amount of time that your starting stack would last if you never played a hand. This form of evaluation is in my mind relatively useless as even if you were “card dead” it would not be proper tournament strategy to never play a single hand and eventually get blinded out of the tournament.

While I don’t think this graph shows anything that we don’t already know, the GN tournament drops off fast, the WSOP tournament has a much gentler decline. The GN tournament would last about 2 ½ hours, the VDS about 4 hours and 40 minutes, and the WSOP is 5 hours

What I do find interesting about this graph is the very sharp drop off that you see on the VDS line. While not nearly as steep of a drop off as the GN tournament, it is nowhere near as flat as the WSOP tournament

Section Conclusion

While the WSOP tournament gives you the most play and has the flattest blind off rate the VDS tournament gives you almost as much time for 1/3 the cost. I don’t think this is anything surprising and I believe that the Original Poker Tournament Formula for evaluating tournaments correctly identifies these facts (see The Poker Tournament Formula graph below).

Big Blind Increase Percentage by Level

The first evaluation of the data that I find to be useful is an analysis of how much the big blind increases from level to level (another equally important but unevaluated analysis would be the Cost Per Round which would include the blinds in the analysis. I can add that later)

The data in this graph points to two main points that I feel are relevant to comparing tournaments.

• Average Big Blind Increase Per Level
  
• The peaks of one tournament compared to each other.
  

Average Big Blind Increase per Level

It is kind of hard to see because the other tournaments obscure the line but when you look at the data for the WSOP tournament it is very obvious that for the first 3 levels the blinds increase 100%, 100% and 50% respectively. After the third level (with the exception of the 7th, 9th, 15th, and 17th levels) the percentage of increase is between 20 and 33%. As we already know the WSOP tournament is marathon, not a sprint.

For the GN tournament (one of my personal favorites to play) the average increase for the BB is to say the least shocking. Of the three tournaments evaluated for this report this is most obviously a donkfest. 5 of the levels have 100% increases and one of the levels has a 200% increase (level 8 when the Big Blind goes from $2,000 to $6000).

Looking at the VDS, the rate of increase is definitely different from either the WSOP or the GN. I don’t want to say better because that is a relative and subjective statement. There is only one increase that is 100% (level 5 when the BB goes from 200 to 400) but there are 5 levels that have a 50% increase (levels 2, 6, 15, 21, & 50). So the VDS tournament blinds are the slowest on average of the three tournaments evaluated (32% average per level compared to 33% for the WSOP and a whopping 84% for GN)

Peaks from one tournament to the other

I think that a careful review of the data shows that the WSOP peaks are early and then it settles down into a steady increase. The VDS peaks really only once but also settles down. The GN tournament is seriously a crap shoot when evaluated strictly by the percentage that the blinds increase level to level

Section Conclusion

I think that this is the first real gap in The Poker Tournament Formula’s analysis of tournaments. When you input the numbers into TPTF spreadsheet the WSOP has a patience factor of 28.77 and a skill level of 6, the VDS has a patience factor of 20.44 and a skill level of 6 as well, and the GN has a patience facto of 5.7 and a skill level of 3. While this seems to correlate with the findings of this section it really doesn’t.

• The VDS tournament actually has a lower average blind increase yet with TPTF the patience factor is 8.33 less. While I am sure this is due to the 20 minute difference in the blind levels the fact that the blinds are on average more flat would suggest that you can have more patience.
  
• The WSOP tournament seems to front load the blind increases at the start while the VDS spreads out the increases more evenly across the entire tournament. This could be due to the creators of the WSOP tournament wanting to facilitate more starting players but designing the tournament to knock out a large group of those starting players early and then settling in for a longer more drawn out process for those that make it through the first hurdle.
  
• The GN tournament has a patience factor that is 81.2% lower than the WSOP and 73.2% lower than the VDS, the average blinds increase of 84% per level which means that each level that you play is exponentially faster than the last level. This fact is completely missing from TPTF.
  

Relative M Over Time

To fully understand the pressure of the blinds on a poker tournament you must evaluate a players M (introduced to me by reading Harrington on Hold’em volume II). There are two methods of evaluating a tournaments M. The first (and I believe more important and informative) is the Relative M Over Time which accounts for the blind off affect, and the M Relative to the Starting Chips that I will discuss next.

Looking at this graph, which is compiled by looking at the M for each level after accounting for the blind off rate, you see that the VDS tournament is on paper better than the WSOP with an M that is higher for all of the levels before being blinded off. The trick to understanding the graph is to understand the affect that the 20 extra minutes that the WSOP has for each level. Looking at the data may make it easier to understand

LEVEL	WSOP	VDS
1	60	80
2	35	50
3	14.5	35.5
4	6.67	17.36
5	2	9.23
6	0	3.6
7	0	.58

Is this important? Can we learn anything about a tournament based on evaluating the Relative M over time?

Section Conclusion

I believe that this is important when you take into account other factors. With the above data you will have an M of 0 by the 6th level if you play in the WSOP event. In the VDS event you could make it to the 8th level before truly having an M of zero. So the longer rounds in the WSOP tournament allow you to technically stick around longer but by the third level your M is 14.5. Many pros feel this is well into the danger zone

What we can learn is, the TPTF evaluation of an individual tournament is not adequate. What is needed is a detailed analysis of multiple tournaments. What would be even better is an evaluation of all the available tournaments to that this type of difference can be identified.

Finally what I think is to be learned by this analysis is that even though a tournament has a large starting M (look at the GN tournament with a starting M of 106.67), the starting M has little or no bearing on how fast or slow a tournament is.

M Relative to Starting Chips

The second component of evaluating M is to look at how each level’s M relates to the starting stack. The first measurement point for this evaluation will be the same as the previous section (WSOP – 60, VDS – 80, GN – 106.67). However what we are looking for is how quickly the line drops to zero. The better the tournament the more arch we will see in the line. From the above graph you can see (and it should be no surprise) the GN tournament drops like a rock while the WSOP and VDS tournaments have a much more pronounced and gradual curve.

For the rest of this section I will be dropping the GN from the discussion it should be obvious at this point that this tournament is ultra fast (even faster than TPTF indicates).

The question then is which tournament has a better M relative to starting chips. My interpretation is that the VDS starts out with a better M but then with the exception of a few levels (2, 7, and 8 ) has a bigger drop in M per level. A bigger drop in M is not as good as a smaller drop in M. That being said, the difference is not very significant, on average only $0.71 with most of the difference occurring in the first 8 levels the argument could be made that the differences between the WSOP and VDS tournaments is statistically insignificant.

Section Conclusion

I am not yet convinced that you can evaluate a tournament by evaluating each levels M in relation to the Starting Chips. The difference between the WSOP and VDS is so small I can help but to think that on this point it is really a judgment call and nothing concrete.
What is interesting is to note that while TPTF gives both the WSOP and the VDS tournament a skill rating of 6, the patience factor is 40% higher for the WSOP tournament and this evaluation does not support that finding.

The Poker Tournament Formula

The above graph provides the salient details that TPTF provides about a tournament; Blind off Rate, Patience Factor, and Skill. To take each aspect of the graph you see the following

• You would blind off slower in the WSOP, next VDS, finally GN. This is not surprising as the creators of these tournaments have designed them this way. In some ways this evaluation is stating the obvious
  
• You would also see that the WSOP requires more patience than the VDS which requires more patience than the GN. Again something that you might think is obvious but I think is misleading. The other forms of analysis show that while the WSOP tournament takes longer, the patience factor in relation to the M is almost identical to the patience factor of the VDS tournament. For sure the WSOP tournament does not require 40% more patience than the VDS.
  
• Finally the skill level. Since 6 is the highest skill level presented in TPTF it is hard to argue that both the WSOP and VDS tournaments require a skill level of 6. However I have a huge exception with rating the GN tournament a skill level 3. As all of the other analysis of this tournament shows, this tournament is fast, will require that you be very lucky, or can seriously outplay all of the other players.
  

Final notes

What is the point of this analysis? For me I want to understand the way that a tournament is set up so that I can pinpoint when and where the best place to play is. I am on a limited budget both for money and time as I have not yet made the leap to full time player. So finding the tournament that offers the best bang for the buck is crucial. Does any of this analysis help you play JJ before the flop? No, except that if you are playing at the GN and you are in level 3 or higher your chip stack is probably going to make those cards either All in or fold, but you already knew that didn’t you?

My method of evaluating the tournaments and comparing it to TPTF is just the starting point. I encourage more discussion on the subject for two reasons. 1) the more we educate ourselves and choose the correct games for each of our own level of play the more money we stand to make in the long run, 2) the more we educate ourselves and stay away from tournaments with poor structures the sooner those tournaments will either end or change.

This analysis of tournaments has mentioned the cost of the tournament but has not factored in the cost into any of the calculations. It should be noted that you can play in 3 VDS tournaments for just $120 more than 1 WSOP tournament. And when you go into battle isn’t it better to have three bullets than just 1?

One final note if you have additional methods that can be used to evaluate the tournament please share them. The best thing we can do for each other is to help each other become better players and that should start with game selection.

PokerShark70