It's harder than ever to get to a final table these days. Fields are enormous, structures are often fast, and the players are getting tougher all the time. So, when you are lucky enough to reach a final table, it's all the more important to be as prepared as possible. There will be a lot of money on the line, and you will have been playing for a long while just to have reached the final-table stage. Don't let any of this stuff distract you. Clear your head of all that's been happening, and think only about how to make the best decisions possible for the next few hours of your life.
Entire books can and should be written about final-table strategy. I figured that I should begin at the beginning. In this column, I want to focus on how to evaluate your position at the final table. As in any game with a strategic component, if you can't figure out the value of your position, you have nothing on which to base your decision-making. Proper evaluation of a final-table situation is the first step toward knowing how to make good deals, knowing which risks to take and which to avoid, and becoming a serious threat to win poker tournaments.
Your value at a final table depends on four things: (1) the amount of chips you have, (2) the amount of chips that each individual opponent has, (3) the payout structure of the event, and (4) the relative skill of the remaining players (yourself included). Those first three things can be perfectly quantified - although, as you will see, even quantifying those things perfectly doesn't necessarily make it easy to assess your value. The skill factor is much more subjective. How do you know for sure that you're better than the guy sitting across from you? To make things easier on ourselves, we're going to assume that all of the players at the final table are equally skilled. This assumption works well in real life, too, as most poker players far overvalue their skill advantage compared to their opponents. Each person at the table usually thinks he is the best player there. Everyone can't be right. If you assume no skill advantage, you'll come up with a conservative estimate of your value. You can always make minor adjustments later, if you really believe that you have a substantial skill edge.
It's pretty obvious that the more chips you have, the more you are worth at the final table. It might not be immediately obvious why the payout structure makes such a difference. Here's a quick example: Let's say that you have half of the chips in play with four players left in a typical multitable tournament, and your opponents all have equal-sized stacks. You are in a commanding position, as you have a 50 percent chance of winning the coveted first-place prize (the chance of winning the tournament is equal to the percentage of chips that a player has, since we're assuming equal skill). Since a big chunk of the remaining prize pool will go to the first-place finisher, you'll be worth much more than any of your opponents. There is a big difference between your value and theirs.
Now let's say, instead, that this tournament has a supersatellite prize structure, and the top three finishers all win a seat in a big tournament, while the fourth-place finisher gets nothing. You still have a lot of equity by having half of the chips in play, as you are extremely likely to win a seat. But each of your three opponents is also very likely to win a seat. You're not worth
that much more than they are.
To see why you need to worry about the stack size of each individual opponent, rather than just your own stack size, let's continue with our supersatellite example. If you're one of the three players holding 16.7 percent of the chips, while one other player has 50 percent of the chips, there is a realistic chance that you won't win a seat. One of the three short stacks is likely to bust out next, and you're as likely to bust out as any of them - meaning there is close to a 1-in-3 chance that you won't win a seat (not exactly 1-in-3, because there is still some chance that the guy with half of the chips will get unlucky and finish fourth). On the other hand, what if you still have the same 16.7 percent of the chips, but two of your opponents have only 1 percent of the chips each, while another opponent has a giant stack of more than 80 percent of the chips? Now, it's all but certain that one of the microstacks will bust out next, and your chance of finishing fourth is far less than 1-in-3. Your chip count is exactly the same as in the previous example, yet your value is much higher.
The challenge for poker mathematicians, then, is to incorporate the payout structure and the various stack sizes into a tidy formula that tells you how much you're worth at a final table. Fortunately, a lot of nice work has been done to that effect. Unfortunately, the formula isn't tidy - at least not the best formula. There do exist some quick-and-dirty formulas that are easier to use, but far less accurate.
Before we even get into the formulas, I want to make an important point: Be careful when calculating the effective payout structure. I'll explain what I mean. Let's say there are four players left and the prize money payouts are: first - $150,000, second - $100,000, third - $75,000, fourth - $60,000. Everyone already has locked up $60,000 each; no one is fighting for that $240,000 anymore ($60,000 x 4). To figure the
effective payout strucure, subtract $60,000 from each stack to get: first - $90,000, second - $40,000, third - $15,000, fourth - $0. That's all you're playing for at this point. There is $145,000 remaining in the prize pool that hasn't been spoken for. If, for whatever reason, you think you are worth 20 percent of the remaining prize pool, you are then worth $145,000 x .2 = $29,000 -
on top of the $60,000 you've already locked up. In a fair deal, you should be getting $89,000. If, instead, you multiply by the original prize pool, you'll think you're worth .2 x $385,000 = $77,000, and you'll be costing yourself $12,000. It's easy to make this mistake in the heat of battle at a final table. I've seen it happen. Don't make this mistake yourself.
In my next column, we'll take a look at some of the formulas those wacky poker mathematicians have come up with. I hope these formulas will prove to be useful to some of you readers, and help to earn you some victories at final tables in the near future.
Matt Matros is the author of The Making of a Poker Player, which is available online at CardPlayer.com.
