Ready for Re-Entry

About a year ago, multi-entry tournaments were all the rage at a certain online poker room, now disgraced. I wrote a column extolling the innovative idea of allowing players to take up several seats in the same tournament at the same time. Of course, the idea would’ve worked a lot better if the online site running the events had had the funds to pay the winners.

There’s no exact parallel in the brick-and-mortar poker world to multi-entry tournaments, but recently we may have come about as close as we’re likely to get. They’re called re-entry tournaments. The concept is simple: if you lose all your chips, you can buy in again. Sometimes you have to return the next day, and sometimes you can get right back in line, but the point is, in a re-entry tournament, you don’t necessarily bust when you bust.

Action junkies love re-entry events. They get the chance to play loose and fast with their first buy-in, knowing they have another bullet to fire if their gambling doesn’t work out. Purists hate re-entry events. The whole point of tournament poker, they would argue, is that you can’t go back into your wallet to purchase more chips. Many such players view themselves as survivalists, less likely to need a second entry, and therefore less likely to benefit from the re-entry rule change.

Me? I’m only interested in value. Coming from that standpoint, I neither love nor hate re-entry tournaments. The benefits are bigger prize pools and reduced variance. Reduced variance, Matt? Can’t I lose several multiples of a buy-in instead of just one? Well yes, but let’s consider a $1k re-entry tournament with two day ones (1A and 1B), where if you bust on 1A you’re allowed to try your luck again on 1B. If you view this event as a $1k tournament, then sure, your variance is greater. But your average buy-in will be bigger if you’re planning to use the re-entry option, so you shouldn’t think of this as a $1k event! Say an average player cashes ten percent of the time in a normal tournament. In our re-entry tournament, that player will cash more often, so long as he’s committed to playing both days if he has to. Ten percent of the time he’ll cash with his 1A buy-in. Some other percentage of the time he’ll make it through Day 1A, but bust before the money. Let’s call that 30 percent. In the remaining 60 percent of his entries, he plays Day 1B, and cashes on that entry 10 percent of the time. So overall, our hypothetical average player cashes 16 percent of the time (10 percent from 1A starts, 6 percent from 1B). Cashing at this higher rate will reduce variance, assuming of course that you’re comparing apples to apples. Our re-entry tournament is really something like a $1,600 buy-in event (1.6 times the minimum $1K investment). Sixteen-hundred dollars is our average player’s average buy-in – 40 percent of the time he pays $1K, 60 percent of the time he pays $2k.

OK, so re-entry tournaments have bigger prizepools and lower variance. What’s the problem? Well for starters, the bigger prizepool is somewhat of a mirage. Remember, we’re looking at the buy-in as our average cost of the event. The recent Borgata Winter Open main event (a re-entry tournament with rules very similar to the 1A/1B scenario I outlined above) got 734 entries for a $3,300 plus $200 event – a prize pool of $2,422,200. Not too shabby! But if you instead think of it as the prizepool for a $5,280 plus $320 event ($3,300 plus $200 times 1.6), it’s the equivalent of only about 460 buy-ins or so. Still pretty good, but not quite as impressive as in the $3,500 case.

There’s an even worse downside to re-entry events: the fields are much tougher. Virtually every strong player commits to re-entering if they bust on Day 1A, but almost none of the weaker players, those who qualified via satellite or via a lucky streak at the tables, do the same. Essentially, there are 1.6 copies of every good player in the field, but only one copy of each fish. In that Borgata event, I was eliminated on Day 3, just a few tables away from the money, by eventual second-place finisher Jeff Papola, one of the strongest no-limit hold’em players in the world. He had busted on Day 1A.

Finally, there’s an interesting wrinkle to some of these 1A/1B re-entry tournaments, which is that even if you make it through Day 1A, you’re allowed to give up your stack and re-enter on Day 1B. When would it make sense to do this? We discussed this question at my table at an Epic Poker event I played last year, and I argued that a good player should surrender anything less than a full starting stack. My rationale was that my EV is one buy-in profit, so my starting stack is worth twice what I paid for it. I realized later that there were several problems with this logic. First, it takes the entire tournament to realize one’s EV, not just Day 1. Second, most players overestimate their EV in tournaments (and in poker in general). The third, and biggest, flaw is that playing a full day of a major event is a mentally draining, often soul-crushing experience. It’s a rare person who wants to go through all that, only to light his chips on fire and play again the next morning. I now think it can never be a big mistake to hold onto your stack from Day 1A, no matter how small it is. At the Borgata event we started with 30K in chips, and I ended Day 1A with 26,700. I didn’t even think about surrendering it.

While I don’t expect the main event of the World Series of Poker to ever turn re-entry on us (the purists will make sure of that), these events are here to stay. The house gets to charge more juice, and the players see bigger prizepools. Just be sure to keep in mind, as you consider whether to play this new tournament format, that the buy-ins are bigger and the fields are tougher than that might appear at first glance. ♠

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