Posts Tagged ‘poker ROI’

Multi-tabling and its Effect on Poker ROI

Thursday, May 3rd, 2012

As we’ve talked about in the past, return on investment (ROI) is a very critical concept for poker tournament players to understand. ROI shows you how much money you’re earning back based on the amount you are investing in buy-ins. If you’d like to learn more about ROI, check this out.

Moving along, some people worry about multi-tabling because they know it’s likely to have an adverse effect on their profit rate. For example, if you go from playing one table to playing 4 poker tables, your ROI could drop from 15% to 8%. Now this might sound like a significant drop, but it’s actually a good thing – as we’ll explain.

Focus on Overall Profits

While we’d all like to have a pretty ROI, the most important thing to focus on is your overall profits. Using the previous example – where your ROI drops from 15% to 8% – let’s say that multi-tabling four tables helps you go from playing two MTT’s daily, to playing eight MTT’s daily.

With the situation where you’re only playing two MTT’s, you’d be earning $3 per day (20 x 0.15). Looking at the eight MTT’s per day, you’d be making $6.40 in profit per day (80 x 0.08). Taking this further, you’re making over twice as much money each day by multi-tabling four tournaments, as opposed to playing just one.

Finding a Balance

Like we showed before, playing more than one table at a time can turn into a lot more profits. However, it’s important to understand how multi-tabling too many tables can hurt both your profits and ROI.

To illustrate this, let’s assume that you move from one $10 MTT at a time to multi-tabling six MTT’s, and your ROI drops from 15% to 1.5%. Assuming you’re still able to get two $10 MTT’s in daily while single-tabling, you’d now be playing twelve $10 MTT’s daily; unfortunately, your daily profits have fallen from $3 to $1.80 (120 x 0.015).

Obviously this is too many tables for you to handle at once, and the multiplied simultaneous decisions are hurting your overall profits. That said, you’ll need to move up slowly when it comes to multi-tabling so you don’t end up hurting your game.

Calculating ROI for Poker Tournaments

Thursday, March 22nd, 2012

One very useful tool for measuring your success in poker tournaments is return on investment (ROI). The basic definition of ROI is how much money you’re earning back from your buy-ins. Unsuccessful players will have a negative ROI, while really good poker players will have positive ROI numbers, meaning that they’re profitable.

So obviously it’s good to know what your poker ROI is, but the only problem is that many beginning players aren’t exactly sure how to calculate their return on investment. That said, let’s take a look at the formula for measuring ROI in SNG’s and MTT’s:

(tournament winnings – tournament buy-ins) / tournament buy-ins x 100 = ROI %

Now that we’ve covered the ROI formula, it’s worth looking at an example. To set this up, let’s say that you play 200 SNG’s with a $5 + $0.50 buy-in ($1,100 total buy-ins), and make $1,250 in total profit. This would make your formula and answer look like the following:

($1,250 – $1,100) / $1,100 x 100 = 13.6% ROI

This is actually a really good ROI no matter what stakes you play. To put this into number form, you would theoretically earn about $0.75 in profit for every $5.50 SNG you played.

However, it is worth mentioning that 200 tournaments isn’t nearly a big enough sample size for determining whether you’re a truly successful player. After all, online poker is full of swings, and sometimes these swings last for hundreds of tourneys.

But this doesn’t mean you should neglect to keep track of your poker ROI because it can be a very useful tool along the way. Just don’t obsess over it with a small sample size because you can’t really tell much from this. More importantly, don’t become lax and stop studying poker strategy just because you initially start off with a really good ROI.