News: Why you should NEVER late register a PKO

With wisdom from his new book PKO Poker Strategy, Dara O'Kearney shares why being late for a PKO is like paying extra rake.

One of the big debates in tournament poker is how long late registration should be. It has been shown that late registering is almost always profitable in regular MTTs and we showed it to be especially profitable in satellites in our previous book Poker Satellite Strategy. In our new book PKO Poker Strategy we tackle the same question with progressive knockout tournaments and we arrive at just as clear a conclusion.

Late registering (and re-entering) is the worst thing you can do in a PKO tournament.

We do a deep dive into your equity and how it goes up and down with each elimination, but we don’t need a solver to make the argument. Quite simply when you register late for a PKO, you can never win the bounties that have already been won.

An extra rake for being late

Every elimination sees at least 25% of a buy-in removed from the prize pool and the later you register, the smaller the prize pool you are playing for. Think of that 25% of a buy-in as an additional rake you have to pay. In a 100 runner $215 PKO, every player eliminated is like an extra $0.50 in rake you have to pay (the $50 bounty divided by 100 players). This isn’t so bad if you late register near the start of the tournament where only a few players have bust, but terrible if you register at the last minute.

Late registering after five people bust a $215 PKO with 500 runners is not so bad, that’s just an additional rake of $0.50. Late registering that same PKO just before registration ends and 100 players have been eliminated is much worse, that is like adding an extra rake of at least $10 before you even start. Because of the gambley nature of PKOs you can also expect a lot more eliminations than usual at the start, so if you can’t register in the first 15 minutes of the tournament it’s probably not worth it.

To frame it a different way, if you register on time for a PKO you actually gain equity from all the players who are going to register late. Your $200 of equity at the start of a $215 PKO is actually going to be worth a little more than $200. Just as there are implied odds when you play a speculative hand, there is implied equity when you early register a PKO. Trying to calculate such implied equity would be near impossible, so let’s just say you are always better off registering on time, especially in PKOs with a long late registration period.

You can't see the money being removed

wsop cash — If you saw the money leave, you would register on time

A lot of players seem to think late registering is good because the stacks have moved around a bit and some big bounties are out there. It’s a cognitive dissonance because the bounties are bigger than at the start, so it seems like a better time to go in. The flaw is that these players are looking at the individual bounties, they are not looking at the total bounty pool. The sites are smart about this because they do not make it obvious how much of the bounty prize pool has gone.

At the World Series of Poker Main Event final table they put all the millions of dollars on the table to show what is being played for, if they did that at the start of a PKO with all the money on a separate table and every time somebody won a bounty they got up and took their bounty from the table, people would soon realise how bad late registering is.

I’d actually suggest that a slightly losing MTT player might become a slightly winning PKO player if they simply register at the start of the tournament. The impact of registering late is so severe for those that do it they are literally handing EV to the early birds.

To learn more about PKOs you can buy the book now on kindle or paperback at Amazon right now.

An extra rake for being late

You can't see the money being removed

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