Blue is good

Some blue figures have started appearing in my poker spreadsheet. Blue is good. My profit for the very young 2011 moved into positive territory yesterday after a good result in the "early bird" (6:50 am) single draw tournament. I finished third out of 55 without having to rebuy, turning $5.50 into $72.50. I ran insanely well in the early stages although I was helped by some very poor play from my opponents. I made the nuts on the very first hand and found someone willing to stack off with a 9-8. I was then dealt a pat 9-8 of my own, not a huge hand but plenty good enough against someone who doesn't know the rules of the game, and I was up to 7000 after half an hour. The luck factor in these tournaments comes from who you happen to get on your table as much as the cards you get. When we got down to three I was in second place with chip counts of 85,000, 40,000 and 5000. My strongest opponent had just been knocked out and I felt I could quite easily win the whole thing, but the short stack got lucky against the big stack a couple of times, then he made a 9-6 to my 9-7 to leave me short, and I didn't recover. A shame I couldn't win it, but after my recent run of bad luck in that tournament I was happy with third.

A quick message to Poker Stars: fix your payout structures, dammit! This tournament has an overlay (that's to say, free money) and if anything I benefited from their wacky payout calculations, so perhaps I'm in no position to complain but there are two problems I see:


1. When the tournament doesn't reach its guarantee the total prize pool is $500. Great. But here's the weird bit. If there are 45 entrants they pay out the top seven but when there are 55 the top ten get paid so everyone (except 8th, 9th and 10th obviously) gets a smaller slice of the $500 pie, including the winner. So if you win the tournament from a field of 55 you get less than you do if you win from a field of 45, even though it's obviously harder to win when there are 55 players. I've simplified things a bit because rebuys come into play in this tournament, but I think that when the guarantee isn't reached they should just pay the top seven regardless. Seven out of 55 is plenty anyway.

2. The payouts themselves aren't smooth - they have weird jumps in them that don't make any sense. I've noticed this in pretty much every MTT I've seen.


Here were the payouts from yesterday's tournament:
1st...................$150
2nd...................$95
3rd..................$72.50
4th...................$47.50
5th...................$36.25
6th...................$27.50
7th...................$22.50
8th to 10th.........$16.25

The gap between 2nd and 3rd is too small, 3rd and 4th too big, 4th and 5th too small... Presumably they use some kind of formula - I'd love to know what it is. Why can't they just give second 65% of first (sounds about right), third say 70% of second, and slightly higher percentages as you go down? Here's how I'd split the $500 pie:

1st............$163
2nd............$106
3rd............$74
4th............$55
5th............$42
6th............$33
7th............$27

Here's a graph of their payout scale against mine. I hope you'll agree that mine is smoother :-)