Tourneys not to miss - The List

Hey Erniastukas,

and welcome to the tournament strategy forum. Happy to see you around! I hope you will post some more in the future.

If you have any question regarding tournaments feel free to ask!

Talking about your list:
The tournaments you mentioned are worth a look for sure - but I am not sure which way you want to go with your list.

Do you want to focus on tournaments with added value and/or big overlay or do you want to include "high value" tournaments as well?

How do you define high value?
Lot of bad players?
Small field size?
Big first prize?
Great hourly (--> turbo)?
Great structure (--> rebuy)?
Low variance?

How should these things be evaluated? One would need a gigantic sample size to take educated guesses on the best tournaments out there.

Which buyins do you want to focus on? A recommendation from a 100$ ABI player might not meet the same criteria as a recommendation from a 10$ ABI player. The focus is totally different.

Don't get me wrong: I really like the idea of a list that offers the best value schedule for tournament players. I just think we need some further definition before we get it started

Regards,
Asaban

Wow, that's a warm welcome from you, thanks

Best way to describe tournament for this list is as I named it is - A SIN TO MISS (for any player that's interested in them). That is - it seems there are some events that offer an extra edge over others. And in some cases this edge is huge - I want to pick those.

Big overlay? I guess that can be called an edge.
Lot of bad players? Yes, if by saying "lot" you mean it - I find players at Ladbrokes exeptionally bad (7 players at a table with 50/10 stats ARE a huge edge, I think).
Small field size? Yes, if that leaves lots of GTD money as an overlay.
Big first prize? Yes, if it's actually big compared to the buyin and multiplied by chance of winning (I find 10k depositors FRs with 500 players of much bigger value than similar 10k tourneys with 1,5k players and a $10 buyin).
Great hourly (--> turbo)? Yes, if it's really greater than other turbos.
Great structure (--> rebuy)? Yes, if they are really greater than other rebuys with same BI. Although I hate rebuys, I have something psychological to overcome to treat them as an option worth playing.
Low variance? Eeeee? Low variance = low risk = low reward. There is something wrong here

As this List begins with FRolls, I think it would make no sense to include ABIs of $100 in it We also want to leave some space for improving - you can begin from FRolls, then $1 ones, then $5, then $10 and... let's say $20 is the upper limit of this list. Unless...there is something of FANTASTIC value for...nah, $30 (we all sometimes break those BRM rules and take a chance at the stars, don't we ?)

Thanks one more time for welcoming the idea of this List, and let's start it growing!

I think it's a pretty good idea to compile a list of good value tournaments, but at the same time I think it's very difficult to do so because there's such a vast amount of tournaments out there.

Personally I'd say there's more and more value in tournaments as the field gets smaller and/or weaker. So if we're looking at Stars tournaments, I believe there is a ton of value in the tournaments that do not have a guarantee. The reason being they attract far less players than all the tournaments with guarantees, especially tournaments like the Bigs or Sunday Majors.

At the same time, these tournaments with guarantees attract a ton of fish, so they're great value as well. At the same time, this means a large field size, and thus much higher variance. That's another advantage of the tournaments mentioned above; less variance.

Also very, very, very +EV are the Zoom tournaments. I guess they're high variance, but there's so many fish it's not even funny.

Also want to address this:

Yes, if that leaves lots of GTD money as an overlay.

What I think is really important is to not look at the nominal prize money you can win in a tournament. Just because you can win $20k with a specific tournament doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be a better value tournament than one that has only $500 for a first place finish. Even if there's no overlay with a small field size, a small field size is almost always a good thing, because it reduces variance a ton.

That said, I do think that despite the huge field size, tournaments with large guarantees are great value because of the huge amount of fish that play these tournaments, even if they're higher buy in tournaments.

Lastly, personally I think regular speed tournaments or deep stacked tournaments are better value than turbo tournaments. Turbo tournaments do give a better hourly, but I think the slower structures give you a huge advantage over all the fish. In turbos it becomes a pre flop game pretty quickly, whereas in deeper stacked tournaments you give the fish opportunities to screw up post flop as well, giving you a much bigger edge.

But these are all just my opinions, feel free to disagree

Due to some technical problems I'm not really playing much atm, but I'll try to find a few tournaments that I've played that I think are great value and list them here later

OK, I'll try out some zoom tournaments on Stars, sounds interesting.

Also, can anyone explain me, why large field = large variance? If, for example, paid places start right after when 20% players are left? Basically it's the same as having a lot of extra tables open in the game - but they don't influence you or your game, you don't sit at one table with them, they fight their own game before appearing ITM.

large fields -> a lot of all ins until ITM/ship -> high variance

any red pokerstars tourament in ur br