Why it's always profitable to late register for satellites

Just how much of an equity boost do you get late registering for tournaments? The answer is a lot, especially when it comes to satellites.

There is an interesting conversation going on this week about why late registering gives an edge to the professional players. This week poker pro and tournament director Kenny Hallaert gave a very detailed analysis of why this is, and argued that extended late registration was bad for the game. It really is worth a read if you play MTTs. 

Why I think we should limit late registration and why having long late registration is bad for poker.
An analyse made by me: https://t.co/g5LXZaCeqD

— Kenny Hallaert (@SpaceyFCB) June 23, 2019

Without arguing either way whether it is bad for the game, we arrived at the same conclusion about late registering giving a big equity boost to those that do it in Poker Satellite Strategy. To continue the discussion and so you can draw your own conclusions, here is the relevant section from that book, which was cowritten by Dara O'Kearney.  

Late regging in satellites

One of the biggest decisions you will have when it comes to the early and middle stages of a satellite is when to register. As we have already explored, the early stage is the time to establish a tight image and profile your opponents, and that is certainly what you should be doing as you learn how to play satellites. However, as you get more advanced, there is a lot more merit to registering late.

Even though you will play against the worst players at the start of a satellite, the benefit of registering later is you get an instant ICM edge, especially in rebuy formats where there is an add-on. Satellites are not about getting the most chips, they are about getting to the bubble and surviving. The later you register the nearer you get to the bubble without risking your tournament life. For example, if a satellite has 100 runners, 10 seats and everyone starts with 1,000 chips, you might be able to late register when just 30 players remain. If you started at the beginning you would have a 1-in-10 shot at winning a seat, when you late register you don’t have a 1-in-3 shot because you will be coming in with a shorter than average stack and not much room to pick profitable spots to get your money in, but you will have a better than 1-in-10 shot.

Let’s use an extreme ICM example to illustrate this. Let’s take an unlikely scenario where there are 89 players and nine seats in a $100 tournament, and magically we can late register right on the bubble. Our starting stack is 10,000 but everyone else has 98,890.

Our ICM in this spot, even though we are a massive underdog from a chip perspective, is $243. We have instantly made $143 in equity by buying in on the bubble.

That is with all the stacks being equal, let’s do the same thing but with a mix of stack sizes:

In this case we have $333.79 in equity, so we have made $233.79 for buying in late. Obviously this is a near impossible situation as no operator allows registration this late, so let’s do an example that is more realistic. This time, it’s a $100 satellite with 50 players, five seats to be won and we buy-in in with nine players remaining, our opponents all have equal stacks.

This time we have equity of $126.31, so we have made a ¼ of a buy-in. Now the same example but with mixed stack sizes:

Again, we have made $37 in equity in this example.

The better you get at satellites, usually the better off you will be registering late, even if you have a massive deep stack skill edge against the weak players at the start. Two exceptions here would be live events, where you can amass more reads on your table and build a more reliable image, and ‘bucket list’ event satellites like the WSOP where the players are so bad you can’t pass up the chance to play against them. There is also a very rare exception, usually in smaller online feeder satellites, where the number of players at the start of the satellite is less than or close to the number of guaranteed seats. This is an overlay and it is worth registering early and playing fast, in the hope that you can all get to the money before somebody else registers.

Otherwise, not only does registering late give you an instant ICM boost it will also put you right into the end game and micro stack strategy portions of the game where a solid satellite regular has an edge.

This is an excerpt from Poker Satellite Strategy by Dara O'Kearney and Barry Carter.