Jerrod Ankenman ([info]hgfalling) wrote,
@ 2005-10-26 14:32:00
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In a comment on one of my previous posts, [info]srguapo wrote:

I find the team concept as I've heard described before intriguing, those calling you cheats are just jealous they didn't think of it. I've certainly played against you/your team, but have had no major controntations that I recall.

What do you think about the rate of 1st place finishes? Or I suppose more relevant than 1st place finishes would be the ROI or expected buyins of profit per tourney. Do you care to share those?

I just struggle with what is acheivable in tournaments and as a result where I should be spending my poker time vs. cash games, so I'd love to hear more about how profitable you are. Of course, I'm sure if you wanted to share it would have been part of the OP, but thought I'd ask.

I prefer not to share our win rates with the population at large for a couple of reasons; I'm sure you can understand.

Multi-table tournaments:
I frankly have no idea what kind of win rates you can have in, for example, $10 or $20 tournaments. In the tournaments that I play ($100 and up), I think that the "one buyin per tournament" metric is approximately appropriate for tournaments of about 300 players for the best players in the field. Below that, it's lower; above that, it's higher. I generally believe (as I've posted here before) that noone has a win rate(net) of more than about three or four buyins for tournaments of any size, up to the size of the WSOP this year.

Tournaments have pretty high variance, however. For example, I went nearly ten months in 2004 at roughly break-even in multis. That's not easy to take, and that's one of the primary reasons we formed the team - to reduce variance by swapping action.

Sit-n-gos:
I'm referring here to the Party-style, rapid blinds, 1000 chip-type. The best players can expect to win about .2 buyins at the $200 level (about $40 a tournament). The primary virtues of these are: 1) High win rate (particularly playing 4x) and 2) extremely low variance. The fourth team member calls these "the lowest variance thing in the history of gambling."

Ring Cash games:
To be perfectly honest, I'm not the best person to ask about full cash games. Ask [info]prock.

Short-handed cash play:
When I do play cash games, it's usually shorthanded. My feeling about these games is: some of the best opportunities online are available here, as well as some of the worst situations you can find yourself in. And unless you're very, very good, you're going to have a hard time telling the difference. Variance is high, win rates can be extremely high, but you do have to know your stuff.

Choosing between these is actually a pretty important idea -- the Risk section of our book should be helpful!

---
My own play currently consists of some (not that much) shorthanded cash play during the weekdays, sit-n-gos when I'm feeling blue or just want to crank out some $ with minimal mental effort, and tournaments on the weekends.

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[info]dkuznick
2005-10-26 07:50 pm UTC (link)
sit-n-gos when I'm feeling blue

LOL

(Reply to this)
seed money
(Anonymous)
2005-10-26 10:20 pm UTC (link)
I appreciate the information and find it very interesting. A question I have is how much start up money do you feel is necessary to fund a team? I realize that there are a number of variables, including the number of players on the team, the size and frequency of the buyins, skill level, etc. Assuming that there are 4 majors ($200) every Sunday, 5 team members of moderate skill, and a year time horizon (50 Sundays) then the cost looks something like (4*200*5*50=$200,000). As you said above the best players in the field can average 1 buy-in per event, so the return looks something like $400,000. Now taking into consideration variance (your 10 months in 2004), how much cash would be needed to support such a team before the investment return begins to fund itself? Based on the above, it's costing $4000 a week to play in these tournies, it seems that 10 weeks worth of buyins might be necessary ($40,000 which I realize it not based on any form of statistics and may be a low estimate). What kind of return in percentage would be expected from this investment? So 5 guys with poker skill can come up with 8k each and put it to work? Thoughts...

(Reply to this)(Thread)
Re: seed money
[info]hgfalling
2005-10-27 05:38 am UTC (link)
RoR for the big tournaments is pretty scary. What we did before was play a mixture of large and small tournaments. So like we play the Playa tournament on Paradise (before it disappeared), $100 buyin, 80 players or whatever. Mixing things up like this is helpful to risk of ruin. Also, remember that I'm only putting up a third(ish) of the buyin to any particular tournament.

Now, of course, I have bankroll so I don't need to mix these in. But I find it difficult to play SH holdem while playing tournaments, so I just do. Utilizing table-window space is almost always valuable.

Also, the number of larger tournaments has been growing. Full Tilt's tournament is big now (I got 11th last week). Also, there's a rebuy tournament on a site that is absolutely amazing, in which I've had an outrageous run over the past two months.

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[info]srguapo
2005-10-26 11:21 pm UTC (link)
Thanks Jerrod, useful stuff, definitely looking forward to the book.

I play MTTs of the $215 variety, say 1000 runners, which might take 8 hours to win, but on average I last say 2.5 hours. If I am Jesus and can profit net of the buyin say 1.5 buyins, that just seems like a depressingly low hourly rate (~$130) for something with an insane amount of variance.

I play 30/60 on PP and feel like I can sustain the 1BB/hour thing on 2 tables, so a similar hourly win rate, although kind of a grind.

So although tournaments are a blast, from a money/managing my time point of view, I have a hard time justifying it at all, but I guess life shouldn't be 100% about maximizing money/time and the fun thing is worth something. Certainly though this is a great justification for the team thing if you can set it up.

Thanks for posting your perspective, very helpful.

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[info]hgfalling
2005-10-27 05:34 am UTC (link)
Multi-table tournaments are the least profitable of my poker activities (I think), except for larger tournaments. OTOH, they're a lot of fun, and there are bigger tournaments out there. For example, I plan to play some large fraction of the events in the WSOP this year. If I just ground it out in sit-n-goes all year, I wouldn't feel ready to do that.

(Reply to this)(Parent)

[info]patrissimo
2005-10-27 01:42 am UTC (link)
The fourth team member calls these "the lowest variance thing in the history of gambling."

apparently whoever that is and I say the same thing. My phrasing is "The best Sharpe ratio I've ever seen in poker".

(Reply to this)

[info]awesomescampi
2005-10-27 02:53 am UTC (link)
Since you think team play is ethical, may I presume that running a bot would also reside in your ethical domain?

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[info]jacksup
2005-10-27 03:41 am UTC (link)
What does one thing have to do with the other?

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[info]awesomescampi
2005-10-27 04:44 pm UTC (link)
It's about drawing the reasonable lines around ethical use of external sources. Two lines that can sensible lines drawn is using none at all and using anything short of collusion.

Jerrod pointed out below another line that can be drawn at with the TOS which is reasonable too. I don't think its as strong(but still solid) since Jerrod probably breaks the TOS of software, services and to the greater picture, laws(speeding limits etc..). Also there are probably many things one can do that would be consider unethical by the vast majority which aren't specified by the rules which along with the above demonstrates that ethics don't begin and end with TOS's.

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[info]hgfalling
2005-10-27 05:20 pm UTC (link)
Just to clarify, the ethics of a situation are not determined by the TOS. However, when the TOS are clear about a situation (such as exists with bots), breaking the TOS is almost always going to be unethical. Just because the TOS is silent about a topic doesn't mean that it's therefore ethical. I don't draw my ethical lines at the TOS, except that I did agree to abide by the TOS and therefore consider it some sort of ethical breach to go back on my promise.

I would generally argue that a site that outlawed our consultation would be making a mistake and a stupid rule that only benefits players who don't care about ethics. I would try to convince them that this was a bad rule, etc. But if they persisted in having such a rule, I would abide by it.

Since the TOS of the various sites are silent about this topic, I can use my other ethical compasses which tell me that there we're not acting unethically as long as we maintain the standards which we have set - not discussing hands when we're at the same table and actively playing to minimize our joint equity in marginal situations when we are at the same table.

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[info]awesomescampi
2005-10-27 05:38 pm UTC (link)
Just to clarify I think you are well within ethical lines. And I was going off the old TOS of that didn't explicitly banned bots. Didn't know they updated it.

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[info]hgfalling
2005-10-27 05:17 am UTC (link)
No, of course not. As I've elucidated before, playing as a team as I've described in the online discussion of it is not against the rules of any site. If some site did declare that this was against their rules, we would stop playing there (or refrain from team activities on their site).

You can find more discussion of this, with our responses to accusations, discussion by the parties who were so upset, Lee Jones' statement on the matter, amd so on, by googling "jerrod ankenman cheating" for the twoplustwo thread, and also searching for the same string in rgp archives. And you can read the lengthy discussion that occurred on Paul Phillips' blog by googling "extempore jerrod."

Running bots is against the rules of all the major sites. Hence we would not do that. Really, this is ground that has been covered.

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

[info]michaelsullivan
2005-10-27 12:21 pm UTC (link)
More importantly, an awful lot of the poeple who were upset at first (that includes me, though I'm not sure I posted about it anywhere) basically just had a kneejerk reaction to the fact that you were ignoring the long-time B&M rule of one player to a hand, something they/we assumed would and should apply online as well. Many of them (at least on rgp) have said since that they have changed their mind about whether you are "cheating".

I still think there's a little bit of moral danger when you enter the same tournament (what the catholics would call "the occasion of sin"). I wouldn't feel absolutely certain that I could keep from having the shared roll affect my play decisions in the slight when at the same table. I could clearly keep from doing this intentionally, but I'm not sure it's possible to completely avoid. I'd actually be interested in a discussion from you or other team members about that issue (i.e. why you feel it's avoidable and how you ensure that), but I understand if you don't want to expose yourself to anonymous louts who still conflate your practice with intentional collusion.

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