The Beauty of the ORT

If you want to show a long-term profit in tournaments, it's extremely important to find the ones that offer the best value. Obviously, your dream situation is to have the house adding money to the prize pool. If you can find a tournament with this type of overlay, consider yourself very lucky. Look for any tournament with a guaranteed prize pool, and if it is not attracting enough players to meet the guarantee, you can play with a positive expectation, even if you have only average skills.

You'll occasionally find one of them in a local cardroom, but the vast majority of them will be online. And online is also where we find the next-best, and much more common, tournament value; namely, the online rebuy tournament, or ORT, for short.

Ort (noun) - a scrap or morsel of food left after a meal is completed.

I learned that word back in my SCRABBLE-playing days, but it never paid off the way it has in my poker-playing days. If you play tournaments regularly, and you do not play ORTs, you really should reconsider. ORTs are, hands down, one of the best values in the poker world. And unlike tournaments with overlays, which come along once in a while, ORTs take place hundreds of times each day.

Why does the ORT offer such great value? Let's start with my favorite reason:

1. One-Fourth of the Field Bows Out of the Tournament Before the Rebuy Period Ends

I call this the "early-exit" phenomenon, and it always amazes me how it runs like clockwork. It never fails. Give or take a few players, an ORT with an hour-long rebuy period always loses roughly one-fourth of its players by the first break. If you start with 1,600 players, just hang in there for the first hour and you can expect to lose about 400 of them.

You must understand that those 400 players represent pure dead money. They have no chance of winning. If the tournament is $11 with $10 rebuys, that's at least $4,000 that's essentially added to the prize pool. As long as you don't quit during the first hour (that is, you rebuy whenever necessary), you will never be in this dead-money pool. Instead, you will always have a shot at winning your share of it.

Note that this phenomenon is specific to ORTs as opposed to brick-and-mortar casino (B&M) tournaments. For one thing, an hour in an online tournament is really a lot longer than in a B&M cardroom. Many more hands are played, so it stands to reason that more players will be eliminated. Plus, no one wants to make a trip to a B&M cardroom to play for less than an hour, so players will be more likely to do whatever it takes to survive the rebuy period.

On the other hand, many online players have a more blasé attitude about getting knocked out early. If it happens, they can dive right into a different tournament, or a live game, or they can simply log off and do something else at home. With that attitude, they are less serious about winning the tournament, which of course is to your benefit. Just make sure that you are putting forth your best effort, and not falling into the same trap of indifference that many of your opponents are.

Based solely on this early-exit phenomenon, I think you'd be crazy to go with non-rebuy tournaments. But just like any good late-night infomercial, there's much more! In fact, there are at least four more solid reasons why rebuy tournaments provide such great value. I have enough space remaining to discuss the most obvious of them:

2. The Rake

If you play a standard $100 tournament, you can expect to pay $9 in juice, sometimes more. Let's compare that to a typical $20 plus $2 tournament with $20 rebuys, and make several assumptions:

1. You will rebuy as soon as the tournament starts, so that you double your starting stack. We'll assume that you start with 1,500 in chips, so by rebuying, you give yourself 3,000.

2. Anytime you drop to 1,500 or lower, you will rebuy. In other words, anytime you are allowed to rebuy, you will.

3. If you go broke during the rebuy period, you will make a $40 double rebuy to bring your stack back to 3,000.

4. At the end of the rebuy period, you will take the add-on, which usually offers 2,000 in chips instead of 1,500.

With these guidelines, I have outlined your optimal plan of action for an ORT. Your hope is that you won't need to rebuy too often, but sometimes it can't be avoided. The idea is not to give up if things are going poorly early on. Each successive rebuy still carries a positive expectation, since it is always a superior option to being eliminated. So, make sure that you are financially and emotionally prepared to rebuy as many times as needed. Otherwise, there's little point in playing.

Note that by following the above guidelines, you will be in for at least $62 ($22 for the initial buy-in, $20 for the immediate rebuy, and $20 for the add-on). Based on my individual statistics, I've found that I average roughly 1.25 additional rebuys per tournament (over and above the initial buy-in, the immediate rebuy, and the add-on), as my average investment is about $87. On that $87, only $2 is going to the house.

That represents really tremendous value. On average, I am paying only 2.3 percent juice, when most tournaments in that price range charge at least 9 percent. Even if you don't typically play $100 tournaments, there is an ORT option that is better than whatever non-rebuy tournament you usually play. Instead of a $5 plus 50¢ tournament, you'd be better off in a $1 plus 10¢ tournament with $1 rebuys. Rather than pay $300 plus $20, you could opt for a $50 plus $5 with $50 rebuys and pay a fraction of the juice. Unless you enjoy giving money to the house, the choice seems obvious.

Reasons Three Through Five
Personally, I think the early-exit phenomenon and the reduced rake are more than enough reason to make ORTs your mainstay tournaments. But just in case I haven't convinced you, I'll have more good things to say about them next time.

Matt Lessinger is the author of The Book of Bluffs: How to Bluff and Win at Poker, available everywhere. You can find other articles of his at www.CardPlayer.com.