Galloping along

WARNING! This is another of those occasional posts about my personal results, likely of interest to very few readers. Avert your eyes, maties, or prepare to be bored.

As I've mentioned, on May 10 I started playing around with cheap sit-and-go HORSE tournaments on Poker Stars. I've surprised myself by doing pretty well at them. I wanted to see exactly how well, so I had PS email me my tourney results, and entered them into a spreadsheet. Here's what I found:




I've played 32 of these things, almost all of them for $5 or $10 entry fees (plus the site's take), though a couple were turbo events that have odd amounts. I didn't like how fast the blinds went up in those, so have abandoned them.

I've cashed in 15 out of 32 (47%), with 37.5% being the nominal expectation (because 3 players out of 8 get paid in each one).

Here's the frequency of finishing in each possible place:

1: 8
2: 4
3: 3
4: 2
5: 2
6: 4
7: 3
8: 6

In other words, if I don't finish in the money, I'm most likely to be the first one out! I think that's a result of being aggressive. If a couple of times I either misjudge an opponent's hand strength and push hard where I shouldn't, or get unlucky on the last card after lots of money is in, I'll be out. But if I'm not the first one gone, I'm usually going to cash. And I'm taking top prize a full 25% of the time, twice as often as would be expected with equal luck and skill among eight players. Still, this is a pretty small statistical sample, and this could just be the nice side of variance, with the pendulum about to come back the other way and crush me like a bug.

My return on investment is $1.50 for every $1 spent on entry fees. That sounds spectacular by itself (conventional wisdom is that a working pro should be able to have a $1.10 ROI over thousands of such events, and that $1.40 or more is unsustainable over the long run), but there's a more humbling way to look at it: I've had a total net profit of about $107. They last about 90 minutes if I'm there to the bitter end, a whole lot less when I finish in 8th place. If we assume an average of an hour each, I'm not making even $4/hour yet. So I'm not recommending this as the road to riches. But since I'm still in the way-early learning stages, I'm content with any positive net.

A pure time/reward analysis would say that I'm better off sitting my butt in a casino for those hours, rather than at my desk. On the other hand, this is the sort of thing that I hope will bring dividends with a time horizon of years, when I get good enough at all of the games that I can play them live for something well beyond these micro-stakes.

As an added bonus, I'm having a lot more fun with them than with comparable no-limit hold'em SNGs.