Poker Tournament Win Rate

How to Calculate Poker Tournament Win Rate

by Arnold Snyder
(From Blackjack Forum Online)
© Blackjack Forum Online 2007

Is Your Tournament Strategy a Winner?

One of the biggest problems new poker tournament players face is figuring out whether or not they are playing a winning game. And one of the biggest problems they face in evaluating the strategy advice they receive is figuring out whether or not the person who is giving the advice is a winning player who knows what he’s talking about.

The poker world is unique within the professional gambling world in the carelessness with which players’ records and skill are evaluated. The “Player of the Year” ratings at Card Player, for example, are useless in evaluating a players’ skill or the merit of his strategy because the ratings express the players’ records as total win rather than win rate. Total win is a meaningless number. You can have $1 million in earnings over the past three years, with appearances at the final tables of high-profile televised events, and be a losing player, or you can have $1 million in wins over three years, be virtually unknown, and be the best tournament player out there, earning at a phenomenal rate.

Win rate, not wins, is what tells you whether you’re playing a winning game or not, and it has to be a win rate sustained over a statistically significant number of tournaments. Anybody can luck into a big payout in a single event, but it doesn’t mean he’s a winning player. It’s only if a player can sustain a win rate over many tournaments that he can know that he is playing a winning game.

Win rate is simply your total profits divided by your total buy-in costs, multiplied by 100 to express your win rate as a percentage. For example, if you’ve bought into 100 tournaments for $110 each, your total buy-in costs for those tournaments are $11,000. If your total payouts for those tournaments were $34,000, your profits from the tournaments were $34,000 (total payouts) – $11,000 (total
buy-ins) = $23,000. To calculate your win rate, you divide $23,000 (total profits) by $11,000 (total buy-ins), and get 2.09. Multiply 2.09 by 100, and you get a win rate of 209%.

And what if you paid a total of $11,000 to enter 100 tournaments, but your total payouts were only $8000? I’m afraid that puts you into the situation of having to calculate your loss rate. In this case, your loss over the 100 tournaments is $11,000 (total buy-ins) – $8000 (total payouts) = $3000. To calculate your loss rate, you divide $3000 (total losses) by $11,000 (total buy-ins), and get 0.27. Multiply 0.27 by 100 to express the figure as a percentage, and you get a loss rate of 27%.

The Easy Way to Track Your Poker Tournament Win Rate

If you can use a spreadsheet program, like Excel, use it. But if not, you can easily track your win rate with just a pad of paper and a pocket calculator.

In one column, list the tournament cost, including the buy-in, entry fee, rebuys, etc. In another column beside it, list the return in dollars. For example, if you paid $100 + $30 + $50 for one rebuy, the tournament cost was $180. You busted out halfway through, so the return was $0. Example 2: You paid $200 total combined buy-in/entry with no rebuys, so the tournament cost was $200. You placed sixth, which paid $545. The return is $545. Example 3: You paid $75 +$5, so the cost was $80. You busted out Chris Moneymaker and collected a $25 bounty—but then you busted out before you made it into the money. The return was $25.

What is your win rate for this series of three tournaments?

Step #1: Put the numbers into columns and add them up:

Cost       Return
$180        $0
$200        $545
$80          $25
$460        $570

Step #2: Subtract the total cost from the total return to get your dollar profit:

$570 – $460 = $110 profit

Step #3:  Divide the profit by the total cost:

$110 / $460 = 0.24

Step 4: Convert this decimal to a percentage by multiplying by 100:  0.24 x 100 = 24%.

If you’re not used to converting decimals to percentages, it’s simple. Just move the decimal place two spaces to the right, then add a percent sign (%). Some examples:

0.24 = 24%
0.04 = 4%
1.24 = 124%

Note that in Step #2, if your cost is greater than your return, then when you subtract the cost from the return, you will get a negative number. For example, if my total cost was $460, but my total return was only $310, then subtracting $460 from $310, I would get -$150, and this would represent my loss (a negative profit). Following Steps #3 and #4, I would find that I had a loss rate of 33%, which is the same as a win rate of -33%.

So long as you keep a record of all costs and returns, you can quickly figure out your win rate or loss rate after you add up the columns, using the method above. Using a spreadsheet to keep your records makes it very easy, because each time you add the cost and return of each tournament you play, it will automatically total the columns and figure your dollar profit and percentage win rate.

Any serious tournament player should be keeping track of his win rate this way. It’s also a good idea to keep separate data for different types of tournaments. For example, it would be smart to keep separate data for online versus live tournaments. You might also keep separate data for multi-table tournaments versus single-table tournaments. Or high buy-in events versus low buy-in events. Or fast tourneys versus slow tourneys. Or no-limit events versus limit events. This type of data lets you know where you’re making your money, and where you’re struggling.

Poker Tournament Win Rate and Variance

It’s important to realize that luck does play a role in tournament results, and the fewer the tournaments you’ve entered, the more of a role luck will have played in your win rate.

If you have played just a few tournaments, and you’ve gotten lucky, you can appear to have a high win rate just because the big payout from your good luck is being divided by so few buy-ins. Before you can start talking meaningfully about your win rate in tournaments, you have to have played a lot of tournaments.

Basically, the bigger your win rate, the fewer the number of tournaments needed to have a statistically significant win rate. The smaller your win rate, the larger the number of tournaments needed to have a statistically significant win rate. “Statistically significant” means that you’re mathematically beyond the results you can reasonably expect to get from luck.

Again, when a player or an “expert” tells you how good he is, don’t ask how much he’s won. Ask about his win rate.

Radar on Win Rate

In a field of 125 players, all other factors being equal, you should probably be in the money roughly one out of every five tournaments.
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When field size goes up, variance goes up, but your edge and win rate should go up as well, so that takes care of some of the extra variance. For example, if field size doubles, your draw-downs won’t be twice as bad, and you won’t finish out of the money twice as often. The flux may get something like 25% worse. For example, in tournaments with a field of 250, you should probably in the money something like once out of every 6-7 times. And so on. This assumes a strategy where your priority is building your bankroll rather than maximizing first place finishes, even though top payouts are crucial to your win rate. In other words, I’m not basing this on a max flux strategy. And this is an estimate based on feel and experience, rather than on any particular calculations.
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If you’re going through terrible long stretches where you never get in the money in 20 or 30 tournaments (assuming you’re not playing in the WSOP main event, against 6000 other players), you’re probably safe in assuming you’re doing something wrong. You may still be playing with an edge, but it is probably too low of an edge.
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To figure out what you’re doing wrong, always keep track of the hands you go out on or lose large amounts of chips on. (You may actually go out on an all-in with a 10-8o because you’re desperate, but that’s not what you’re interested in. You’re interested in the losses that got you to the point of desperation.)
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You will see patterns. For example, you will see that you are frequently losing large numbers of chips with AK or big pairs. (Guilty. Sentence served.) Or you will see that you go out calling all-ins when you know you have the best hand, and they suck out. Or whatever. Once you spot a pattern, think about how you might play that situation differently. Try to think completely outside the box. Forget everything you ever learned about how to play poker, because much of it is wrong for tournaments. 
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Maybe there isn’t a pattern with particular types of hands–maybe you’re just getting short too often. That’s a bad pattern too. Why aren’t you making more chips?
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Also, take note of when you are going out of tournaments. If you’re always going out of a particular tournament between the 7th and 9th blind level, you’re doing something wrong. Or if you’re always going out in the first two hours, you’re doing something wrong.
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If you’re moving up in Skill Level, you’re most likely to be making mistakes in how you handle a big stack, not a small stack. Small stack basic strategy is pretty simple. Big stack strategy is where all the money is and where all the mistakes are too.

A win rate of 204% means that, if you paid $100 total in buy-ins, you cashed out $304 total in payouts, for a total profit of $204 and a win rate of 204%. (204 / 100 = 2.04, or 204%).

So, if you played 240 fast tournaments at an average buy-in of $200, to get a 204% win rate you’d have to have earned $97,920 in profits on your $48,000 in buy-ins, which means you received $145,920 in payouts in those 240 fast tournaments.

To get the brother-in-law’s win rate of 100%, you’d have to have earned $48,000 in profits on those $48,000 in buy-ins, which means he would have had to receive $96,000 in payouts. ♠