Multiple-Entry Tournaments

Every so often, an innovation comes along that is so clearly beneficial to society that we wonder how we ever got along without it. On that note, I’d like to mention that Full Tilt Poker recently introduced multi-entry tournaments, in which players are allowed and even encouraged to buy in more than once.

(As of this writing, up to six buy-ins are permitted in some events.)

OK, maybe these new multi-entry events won’t cure cancer, or fix the economy, or even revolutionize the poker industry, but I can’t believe that it’s taken this long for the idea to be implemented. And these tournaments sure do generate some action! Prize pools have been many multiples of what they were without the multi-entry option. The software guarantees that a player’s entries will always be at different tables. The only catch is that if you have more entries than tables remaining in the tournament, two of your entries will have their chips combined into one stack. The whole multi-entry concept is yet another stroke of brilliance from the people who brought us Rush Poker and synchronized tournament breaks.

The natural question is, should I play multi-entry tournaments, and if so, how many entries should I buy? To answer, let’s first think through what buying in multiple times does to a player’s tournament equity. Obviously, if two entries from the same player could show up at the same table and share holecards, it would be a massive advantage to have multiple entries. Indeed, it would be an entirely different form of poker. Thankfully, the software takes care of this problem. In fact, because of the possibility of having two stacks merged into one, each additional buy-in is actually worth less to a player than the previous one.

To see why this is the case, consider an endgame scenario in which the final table has just been reached, and all nine players have equal stacks and are equally skilled. We’ll use the following sample prize structure:

The nine equally skilled players at this table all have the same equity — $52,000, or one-ninth of the remaining prize pool. But what if two of those stacks belong to the same player, who’s playing multiple entries? He has to combine his stacks into one. The Independent Chip Model (ICM) says that the other eight players now have $54,448 in equity. The guy who reached the final table with two stacks receives ninth-place money ($8,000) for one entry (Full Tilt Poker’s rule), and his new stack is worth $78,861, according to the ICM, for a total value of $86,861. The same two stacks, were they in the hands of two independent players, would be worth $52,000 × 2 = $104,000. That’s quite a pay cut!

The math works out that way because only one person can win the tournament. If you played this tournament four times, with one entry each time, you theoretically could win it four times and make $600,000. If, instead, you have four entries in the same multi-entry tournament, the best you can do is win $150,000 (for first) + $8,000 (for ninth) + 18th-place money + 27th-place money. With typical prize structures, this will add up to about $164,000 — a far cry from $600,000.

Given these staggering differences, it’s reasonable to ask whether or not it ever makes sense to pay for more than one tournament entry. Let’s say that you’re an excellent player, twice as likely as average to reach the final table. Let’s also say that the $200 buy-in tournament we’re talking about has the prize structure outlined above, and 4,000 entrants. The EV [expected value] of your second entry is affected only when both entries make the final table of the event. With the skill level that I stated, your chance of having one entry make the final table is 18/4,000. The chance that both of your entries will make the final table is 0.002 percent, or about one in 50,000. And that’s if you’re very good. Such a small chance of having your stacks merged means that your EV hardly depreciates with multiple entries. You’re probably worth only a couple of bucks less than you would be if you entered two different tournaments, with the opportunity to win both.

What if, instead, we were talking about a tournament with only 45 players? In that case, even an average player with two entries would get both of his stacks to the final table 4 percent of the time (20 percent x 20 percent). A strong player would be faced with this situation even more often — 9 percent of the time if his normal skill would get him to the final table three times out of 10. The value of a second entry, therefore, is greatly diminished.

A final point about multi-entry tournaments is that, on the whole, they will have tougher fields than regular tournaments. This will be true for the simple reason that good players with large bankrolls are far more likely to be buying several entries than amateurs who are playing for fun, or weak players who might suspect that they’re underdogs to the field. Since almost all of a good player’s edge in poker comes at the expense of bad players, this tougher-field phenomenon could hurt the value of multi-entry tournaments, especially with smaller fields.

My advice is to play multi-entry tournaments, but play them selectively. If there are only a few hundred entrants, you’re probably better off with one or, at most, two entries. In 10,000-player slugfests, however, you can comfortably buy as many entries as you want, but do keep an eye on how tough the fields are. Even in a massive tournament, if the only players who will be remaining in the endgame are experts, you should enter only if you’re a pretty strong player yourself. Most players are not as good as they think they are, and most players don’t give their opponents enough credit for being good. Don’t fall into that trap. Seek out the softest fields possible if you want to increase your bankroll. That said, I think that a lot of the multi-entry tournaments will have a lot of value, and soon. The more popular a tournament format is, the more value it tends to have — and so far, these new tournaments have proven to be very popular, indeed. ♠

Matt Matros is the author of The Making of a Poker Player. He is also a featured coach for cardrunners.com.