What is the top 5% ROI for Vegas low-mid stakes tournament grinders?
Assume buy-ins between $500 to $3,000, what is the realistic ROI for the most skilled 5% low-mid stakes tournament players?
I was always curious whether it was possible to make a stable living playing only tournaments (assuming minimal or break-even EV external staking).
5 Replies
No one can answer this - too much variance, field size, skill level, structure, etc. No one is making a stable living playing MTTs especially live - even live cash has a fair amount of variance unless you have a massive skill edge.
Assume buy-ins between $500 to $3,000, what is the realistic ROI for the most skilled 5% low-mid stakes tournament players?
I was always curious whether it was possible to make a stable living playing only tournaments (assuming minimal or break-even EV external staking).
Like pokerfan said there's really no way for anyone to know even their own true ROI. You can definitely make some money over time playing these types of tournaments but I wouldn't call it a "stable" living.
If you play around with tournament variance calculators it will give you a better perspective. If you have like 30% ROI and play two to three hundred tournaments in a year it will be a fairly normal occurrence to have break-even years (other years you could crush). Worst case scenario if you just run like bottom 1% bad you could also lose for years.
Anyway I've been planning a WSOP grind this year and was playing around with variance calculators based on my own estimated winrate.
I estimated that over the series I would fire approximately 50 bullets with an average buy-in of $1,000. If my estimated winrate is accurate (without saying the exact number it's >30%) then my chance of losing > $25,000 was only around 1%, but my chance of being unprofitable for the series was like 20-25% (before expenses).
The standard deviation was $170,000, so basically my results will be all over the place. That means 70% of the time my results will be within +-$170,000. Like worst case I could cash nothing and lose $50,000 and best case I could win hundreds of thousands or even millions.
That's also assuming relatively static buy-in levels, but in reality I'll be playing a range of buy-ins so my results will be even more random. Like if the series goes well I will likely at least try to satellite into the main event, so if I have an ABI of $1,000 with one $10,000 outlier than my results will be even more all over the place. Also if I play some $500s and some buy-ins as high as $3 k (excluding the main event), then obviously how I run in the higher buy-ins will have the biggest impact on my results.
All that's to say... Live lucky!
I'll make a guess since I didn't really answer your question in my last post.
My guess would be that the top 5% of players would be close to 100% ROI in live low stakes if they played enough volume over time. That's assuming they're making great live reads, and playing highly exploitatively.
There will be some outliers that achieve greater than that, but I'm guessing that's mostly sun-running.
There are likely some occasional tournaments with great structures and soft fields where greater than 100% is achievable, but so many of the lower stakes tournaments are turbo structures with a lot of variance.
Thanks folks for the very insightful responses. Playing around with the calculator with my own numbers, it looks like I can very well be that fish sun-running life...
I think the top 5% of MTT grinders at those buy-in levels have around a 50% ROI. I don't know if 100% ROI in tournaments is even achievable (long-term)
Even if you are a top MTT player, Occasionally they do a have someone punt to them, but a lot of tournaments you end up in 60/40 and 70/30 spots or coin flip situations.
I remember on Sharkscope a while ago they had the best MTT players and the highest ROI was like 50% over a significant sample size. You could make the argument that live players are worse, but I honestly think the skill level of players has improved overall since they had those stats.
