How Much Do The Online 'pros' Spend Per Week On Tournies?

[HighwayStar 8]

An educated guess suggests that the absolute top of the pack online tourney pros invest ~$20k a week.Imagine how sick the downswings must be feel, I just endured a $100 one and it felt dire.

[K-Rock2525 0]

I said 80 percent is my guess, Not a full 100 percent. hoYes your going to have some players who satty in but your also going to have the player who drops 500-600 more into sats who dont satellite in. So then for 1k buyin your actually in for 1600.I know some of the top players who play in these without satting in also

[DrawingDeadInDM 0]

I said 80 percent is my guess, Not a full 100 percent. hoYes your going to have some players who satty in but your also going to have the player who drops 500-600 more into sats who dont satellite in. So then for 1k buyin your actually in for 1600.

Right..and I agree that you do have those players..but for every player who's spending 1600 there's obv several who are spending 1-300.

[K-Rock2525 0]

Yes but the players who are buying in for the 1k directly are your top pros. A lower limit player trying to sat in, wouldn't buyin in directly. It would be interesting to see the numbers on it but i think that your top online pros are buying in directly is around 80 percent. I could be wrong but I feel it is.

[K-Rock2525 0]

Well I have to go now, Just now pulling into the gold strike parking lot in tunica.

[DrawingDeadInDM 0]

Yes but the players who are buying in for the 1k directly are your top pros. A lower limit player trying to sat in, wouldn't buyin in directly. It would be interesting to see the numbers on it but i think that your top online pros are buying in directly is around 80 percent. I could be wrong but I feel it is.

I guess I was misinterpreting what you were saying as, "80% of the field" versus "80% of the top players". I take top players to mean players who(or have a history of being able to) cash high routinely in large buyin large field events and a bankroll that isn't stressed by 15k a week in buyins. I don't know how many people that really is, but I don't think the number is huge.

[checkymcfold 0]

i know of a couple people that told me pre-1k weeklies that it was around 10k, which is sick, lol.also, even the top pros don't expect to make it in on more than half the sats they enter. that's absurd, unless you're talking about the sats to stuff like midnight madness. satting in doesn't save 90% of the buyin, it saves more like 30-40% on average.

[K-Rock2525 0]

yeah i was referring to 80 percent of the top players buying in direcetly, i have no idea what the percentage of the field would be directly buying in.

[DrawingDeadInDM 0]

also, even the top pros don't expect to make it in on more than half the sats they enter. that's absurd, unless you're talking about the sats to stuff like midnight madness.

I don't know what this means.

[checkymcfold 0]

I don't know what this means.

you said 1-300 on sats for 1k tourneys. that's lowballing it longterm, easy.

[DrawingDeadInDM 0]

you said 1-300 on sats for 1k tourneys. that's lowballing it.

Um..no, not exactly. I wasn't saying that the top pro's should expect to spend 300 dollars max on satting in to 1k tourneys. I said that for every person who drops 600 and whiffs, there's going to be a few people who have satted in for 1-300 dollars. If you play 6 sats and whiff, that's 6 people getting in partly on your dime. It stands to reason that one or two of those six were on their first-third tries. It was really probably the most inconsequential thing I said.

[checkymcfold 0]

Um..no, not exactly. I wasn't saying that the top pro's should expect to spend 300 dollars max on satting in to 1k tourneys. I said that for every person who drops 600 and whiffs, there's going to be a few people who have satted in for 1-300 dollars. If you play 6 sats and whiff, that's 6 people getting in partly on your dime. It stands to reason that one or two of those six were on their first-third tries. It was really probably the most inconsequential thing I said.

which is why i didn't quote you originally. it wasn't a direct response to you. you, among others, were saying things that could easily be taken to mean that people expect to win a lot more of their sats than they actually do. take a deep breath, sunshine.

[DrawingDeadInDM 0]

which is why i didn't quote you originally. you, among others, were saying things that could easily be taken to mean that people expect to win a lot more of their sats than they actually do. take a deep breath, sunshine.

My mistake on not being clear enough.I guess I figured everyone knew that your expectation in a 9 handed SNG where winner takes all for a seat is typically not very good. I imagine someone who's *very good* might hit 20-22%. What do you think?

[checkymcfold 0]

My mistake on not being clear enough.I guess I figured everyone knew that your expectation in a 9 handed SNG where winner takes all for a seat is typically not very good. I imagine someone who's *very good* might hit 20-22%. What do you think?

i'm not a tourney guy, but off the top of my head, i'd say somewhere around 20% for 10 man, winner take all sats into the bigger events is probably all you could hope for, realistically.for little sats, in the 20 dollar range, 30-40% should be doable. people are really, really bad in those.

[chowds4 0]

I think PMJackson, TJ or Al Smooth might be the be answer this question.PM has been very upfront about his staking arrangemet with Bax and Sheets.

-this is key..it's redic. how many of the online "pros" are backed by these guys..

[Huskers20 0]

This is from a Bloomberg article today....Not exactly saying amount of $$$ online guys spend, but some of the things a lot of people say in many a other thread.Huskers20Top Poker Players Sometimes Short on Cash: Joe Saumarez-Smith By Joe Saumarez-Smith Jan. 14 (Bloomberg) -- The last time I was in Las Vegas, I stood outside the card room at the Bellagio casino, waiting for a friend to arrive. Along with a few other tourists I watched a poker game just to pass the time. After a few minutes, one of the biggest names in the game, someone whose name you would recognize if you watched even a small amount of televised poker, came and greeted me like a long-lost friend. This was somewhat odd. I had been introduced to him once, a couple of years earlier. He asked if he could borrow $200 because he was running short. This is someone who runs through tens of millions of dollars a year at the tables and for whom $200 is pretty much a rounding error. I politely declined and he went off to do a bit more ``nipping,'' as borrowing from fellow players is commonly termed. The other people standing around were astounded. Could this player really have been asking for as little as $200? Surely it was some kind of a joke. To spare the player's blushes I assured them it was all done in jest but it set me pondering about how little the general public understands the poker economy. When watching ``High Stakes Poker'' or the World Series of Poker on television it's easy to assume that all these people with mountains of chips in front of them are millionaires and living the American poker dream. The sad reality is that a reasonable number of them are broke or, even worse, deep in debt to their fellow players, banks and loan sharks. Financial Backers It is something poker players do not like to advertise. There are two good reasons for this. The first is that people are less likely to lend you money if they already know you are in hock. The second is that the less money you have, the less likely you are to play a confident game. If people know their opponents are playing with their last dollars, they will be able to exert far more pressure on them at the tables. Des Wilson, the author of two books on poker, says players privately admit that they have bad runs. ``If you're sitting having a drink with them, most of them will acknowledge that at some point they have gone broke and had to borrow money. But a hell of a lot is not seen by anyone apart from the top players.'' Many of the top players have financial backers or sell off a share in their action each tournament, Wilson says. ``Then there are players who will offer insurance deals to other players, so they won't lose all their cash if they finish out of the money.'' It is common for the household names of poker to find outside backers, if only to reduce the volatility caused by playing for tens of thousands of dollars a hand. When a bad run for a couple of months can cost a couple of million dollars, it is best to be playing partly with someone else's cash. Sponsorships The other most common form of funding is sponsorship by the major online poker companies. They pay entry fees to the major tournaments, flights and hotel accommodation. Without this backing, several of the big players would have annual losses in excess of $200,000 each. Nolan Dalla, media director of the World Series of Poker, and a former semiprofessional poker player and sports gambler, says nobody should be surprised if the top players lose everything. ``It is almost inevitable that if you play poker for many years, then variance will catch up with you,'' Dalla says. ``The scale of players being backed to play is now much bigger than it ever used to be,'' Dalla said. ``But you also have to think that poker economy is only so big, and it does not have enough money in it to sustain the number of players who aspire to be professionals.'' Poor Discipline Don't feel too sorry for the big-name players. Wilson says most are highly skilled but lack discipline. ``What they tend to be bad at is either money management or other forms of gambling, so they lose all the money they have won at poker at the craps table or betting on sports.'' Of course not every top player is broke. Players such as Phil Ivey, Doyle Brunson and Howard Lederer earn seven-figure totals each year from playing poker. The very best will always be able to make a living from the game. But the ones who tend to shout the loudest about how well they are doing tend, in my experience, to be the ones who disappear from the poker circuit after a couple of years when their funds run dry. (Joe Saumarez-Smith is chief executive officer of Sports Gaming, a U.K. management consulting firm to the gaming industry. He also owns European online bingo companies and odds comparison Web sites. The opinions expressed are his own.) To contact the writer of this column: Joe Saumarez-Smith at jssmith15@bloomberg.net . Last Updated: January 14, 2008 00:06 ES

[PillyPill 0]

I read the first page, and not the second page, so not sure if this was posted.Is it just me, or does it seem like the "top" or "2nd tier" online pros could qualify for atleast the main sundays on a regular basis and probably qualify for others if they wanted to? I know if I wanted to be a "pro" or full time player, i would probably grind the qualifiers.

[aussiedonk 0]

I would be really interested to hear from PMJackson on this.I think a lot of the very top echelon of players actually lose a fair bit of EV by concentrating so heavily on the $100r and $1Ks. Their ROI in these tourneys is generally signifcantly lower than it would be in a $100 f/o. It seems that their ego gets the better of them to a certain extent. Shaundeeb wrote an interesting post on the topic on 2 + 2 - I think it was for his 10K post. He was encouraging top players to enlarge their tourney schedules to include a lot of the mid - low level tourneys ($50 f/o, $10r, even $33 f/o) to cushion the variance of the $100r and $1Ks. This seemed like a pretty smart idea to me.At the other end of the spectrum, Gobboboy (Jimmy Fricke) finished second in Aussie Millions last Jan for $1mill, of which he got $250K, and managed to still have a losing year!!!!!Slight hijack - question for the likes of Looshle, PMJackson, etc - in the post where he stated that he had a losing year, Gobboboy claimed among other things that he ran very bad, and that a year was nowhere near the long term for MTTs (ie variance would not come close to evening itself out over the course of a single year). What do you think of this comment as it applies to online MTTs? I can understand it for $10K live events, as someone might only play 10 in a year. But a pro online player would be playing at least 2000 tournies a year wouldn't they? (maybe more)Basically my question is this: Is it possible for a good online tourney pro putting in decent volume to have a losing year? And if you care to answer, have you personally ever had a losing year online (since you became a pro)?

[onlyme386 0]

15k seems about right for someone playing max volume, but there's really not a lot of guys doing that.As for the 1k weekly, I'd say that the online guys you're talking about who are in sats for this are kinda like stories of the top live pro's playing 1k sng's for the WSOP ME. Just trying to get in cheap, not a huge deal if they don't make it. They'll buy in direct anyways.