How do you measure up against the best tournament players?

RELATED ARTICLES

• Bankroll Management for Heads up S…
• Bankroll Builder: Overlay report f…

One of the neat by-products of the online poker boom has been the emergence of (fairly) comprehensive public records of player performance, especially in tournament play. Tracking sites like thepokerDB and Official Poker Rankings provide you with not only an occasionally sobering reporting of your own results but also a window into the results of those who make a living playing the game of poker.

Sure, all of that data makes for interesting trivia, but it occurred to us there might actually be some useful applications hiding in there as well. So, on one of those rare weekday afternoons where we found ourselves with a little too much free time, we decided to assemble a statistical snapshot of the top online tournament players. Read on to see how you compare to the best of the best.

What We Did
For our sample, we decided to use the Pocket Fives Top 100 Rankings. Obviously, there’s some subjectivity built into that list, but that’s going to be true of any ‘top’ list. A group of one hundred players seemed like a fair sample size, large enough to flatten out anomalies caused by a few freak under or over-performers.

We then took those hundred players and went over to OfficialPokerRankings.com. We queried results for both the Full Tilt Poker and Poker Stars names of players in the P5 Top 100 using the following settings: Full Tracking with Estimated Rebuy and Addon Expenses. If you’re curious, here’s how OPR estimates rebuy and addon expenses: For R/A (re-buy/add-on) tournaments, buy-in is calculated as an avg. of the total prize pool divided by the number of players in that tournament. (It is not possible to track how many times a player actually re-buys in a tour)

We decided to focus on three key metrics: ROI (return on investment), ABI (average buyin) and ITM % (the percentage of times a player finishes in the money of a tournament).

Both the Pocket 5’s list and the OPR data were taken in December of 2008.

What We Found
There were two members of the top 100 who had opted of tracking, so they were removed from the results. There was also one member who had an ROI on Stars of over 1000% (artificially inflated by a huge win in the WCOOP), so we removed that entry as well. That left us with 97 accounts on PokerStars and 97 accounts on Full Tilt Poker.

ABI: The overall average buyin of these accounts was right about $190. Broken down by site, the ABI on Stars was $185, with the average Full Tilt buyin sitting at $195. Not a massive difference, and probably a result of Stars just offering a broader tournament schedule than FTP with some smaller buyin tournaments such as the $11 rebuy that top players find appealing. The smallest ABI on Stars belonged to caio_pimenta at $55; about 10 players had an ABI lower than $100, included Stars TLB champ Shaun Deeb. Only one player had an ABI lower than $100 on FTP, again reflecting the shallower schedule of tournaments on FTP. The highest ABI? That would be The Universe on FTP at $403, although that number is seriously inflated by high stakes HU SNGs.

ITM : While ABI was all over the map, ITM, or the percentage of times a player finishes in the money, existed in a far narrower range. The breakdown: about 15.5% overall, with Stars sitting at 15% and FTP at just over 16%. That means when one of these players enters a tournament, there’s a 15% chance they’ll make the money – news that should provide at least some encouragement to recreational players, as even the best of the best expect to bow out before the money nearly 85% of the time. PURPLEPILS99 leads Stars with a 21% ITM rate, while jagz7 leads FTP with 37%. Roughly two dozen of the accounts surveyed had ITMs of 12% or lower.

ROI: This is the big number for most tournament players, at least once your sample size is big enough – ROI, or return on investment. ROI basically represents what a tournament player’s given expectation in a tournament is based on past performance. So, if you have an ROI of 100%, you’d expect to profit $1000 when playing a $1000 buyin tournament. The breakdown for this stat goes as follows: on Stars, the top 100 players have an average ROI of 60%, while the number on FTP is significantly lower – 46%, for a combined average of 53% or so. Why the difference? A lot of it comes down to the larger fields and prize pools on Stars, which can result in more significant single wins on a regular basis. Compare the flagship tournaments of the two sites – FTP’s Sunday Major guarantees 750k, while Stars Sunday Million guarantees double that most weeks.

The big winner: PiKappRaider, with an estimated ROI of 231% over a sample of about 750 games on Stars. On FTP, it’s bmf823 (bfineman) with an ROI of over 200%. On the other end of the spectrum, about a dozen of the top 100 have negative or basically zero ROI on FTP, while only three have negative or single digit positive ROIs on Stars.

Summary
So, here’s your composite picture of a top online pro: they have an average buyin of about $190, and when they buy in to a tournament, they’re expecting to make the money a bit better than 15% of the time and to show about a 53% return on their investment. They’ll spend more per tournament on average at FTP than Stars, but have far less to show for it in terms of return.

How about the number one player in the P5’s rankings, AJKHoosier1, aka Alex Kamberis? He can play a little, it seems: 164% ROI on Stars, $173.00 ABI on Stars with a 16% ITM rate. He fares less well on FTP: 39% ROI, $252 ABI with a 14% ITM rate.

Obviously this is far from a methodologically rigid review, but we think it’s still useful as a rough sketch of how you should expect to perform if you’re among the elite of today’s online tournament pros. If you’re coming up short, remember – anything in the positive column still puts you in a pretty elite group when it comes to online poker.

Get your daily dose of poker news with the PTP Hit and Run.

Exclusive Freerolls and up to 60% cashback at Carbon Poker >>>