Why small fields are better for your winrate
Dara O'Kearney compares the Sunday Million to the SuperNova to show the pitfalls of only grinding large field MTTs.
In my book Endgame Poker Strategy: The ICM Book I make the case that most players, especially those learning the game, should play smaller field tournaments (100-200 runners) rather than huge field MTTs. This is mostly because it means you get to practice each stage of the tournament more often, most notably the ICM spots. But small field MTTs also reduce your variance significantly.
If you had unlimited time and unlimited patience then you should only ever play 10,000 runner fields because you will have the greatest edge in them. The best players in the world probably have a 400% edge in the WSOP Main Event, in a soft 100 runner live game it would not be 100%, in a 45 person field it would be about 40%, in an SNG it might be 20%. Variance and ROI have a proportional relationship, the bigger the field the bigger the edge, but also the bigger the variance.
The bigger the field size the bigger your sample size of tournaments has to be to realise your edge. In my own 14 year career I have never had bigger than a $20,000 downswing but it is normal for people to play 10,000 runner fields to have losing years. You don’t need a massive sample to realise your edge when the field sizes are 100-300. This is one of the reasons why Super High Roller tournaments, which tend to have 30-50 runners, thrive despite being made up of tough regulars, you might only need a sample of 500 MTTs.
Let’s put some numbers on this.
Looking at the flagship online poker tournament, the $109 Sunday Million at PokerStars. Assume it gets 7,000 runners on average each week and you have a 25% edge in this tournament. Using the tournament variance calculator at www.primedope.com you can see what happens if you played that event every Sunday for 10 years (520 game sample):
The graph above shows 20 random samples from 1,000 simulated samples. As you can see there is one massive outlier where we win almost $500k in profit but most of our runs end in a loss. Our EV is just $14,170 with a standard deviation of $83,632. With a bankroll of $10,000 (100 buy-ins) our risk of ruin is 86.5% and probability of loss is 56.9%
Compare that to the €109 SuperNova on Sundays at Unibet, which gets closer to 300 runners every weekend.
As you can see our 20 random samples are all closer together but with lower upside when we run great. Our EV is $14,170 and our standard deviation is $15,115. Our risk of ruin is now just 15.10% and our probability of loss is just 17.3%.
Better for your mental game
The upside is obviously much greater in the Sunday Million but 56.9% of the time we will lose money playing it every weekend for a decade. That only happens 15.10% of the time in the SuperNova. You would need to play a sample in the tens if not hundreds of thousands to realise your edge in a massive tournament like the Sunday Million or the WSOP Main Event. When you do the simulation for 10,000 tournaments then your risk of ruin goes down to 30% and probability of loss goes down to 0. This is simply never going to happen, you can never realise your edge in a tournament like this because you will never have time, but you can easily realise your edge in a 300 runner field event like the SuperNova.
Players who concentrate exclusively on large field tournaments often go broke and frequently have to get staked to keep playing where they will be in makeup for long periods, or they need a massive bankroll. I have never had to be staked to play, other than selling pieces, because I have always focussed on low variance formats.
If nothing else then playing smaller field MTTs is better for your mental game. I know big field MTT grinders who are very good who have had losing years, which must be torture for a talented player. Small field MTTs should mean you have winning years every year, you won’t go broke and you won’t need to get staked. That is much better if you value a good nights sleep as a tournament grinder.
It’s good to take shots at bigger field events, in fact shot taking is a legitimate bankroll strategy. Binking a large field MTT is a springboard to playing higher stakes - you cannot really grind your way to the high rollers. I now play large field events because I am at a stage in my career where I have other income streams for when I go on downswings. For up and coming players and those who want longevity in the game, concentrating on smaller fields will keep variance at bay.
Dara O'Kearney's new book Endgame Poker Strategy: The ICM Book is out now.
