Tournament Earnings, Tournament Profits, and Ranking Systems

I’m going to start with a rant: I’m tired of hearing about a poker player’s career tournament earnings. Every time a player is profiled, that’s usually the first thing we hear. Mr. X has $900,000 in lifetime earnings. Ms. Y has $1.2 million in earnings. The numbers always sound very impressive, and in some cases they are legitimately impressive.

But let me put it in perspective. Let’s say Mr. X is an online player who specializes in multitable tournaments (MTTs). He has played professionally for five years, and he plays dozens of MTTs each day. He gets profiled, and we get to hear about his $900,000 in lifetime MTT winnings.

What we aren’t told is how much he has spent in tournament entries. Given that he has played full time for five years, it is completely possible that he has spent $150,000 per year in entries, in which case his total career profits are $150,000. That comes out to $30,000 per year, meaning he has basically been working five years for very modest pay.

Maybe that’s not the case. Maybe he plays tournaments with only a $55 buy-in or lower. If that’s true, he probably spends only $100,000 per year in entries, in which case he has profited $80,000 per year. That’s a much more respectable income, made even more impressive by the fact that he is strictly a low-limit grinder.

On the other hand, what if he plays MTTs with only a $109 buy-in or higher? Heck, he could easily spend a cool $1.5 million in entries over five years, in which case he has lost $600,000! Sure, that’s a less likely scenario, but the point is that we don’t know.

Hearing about a player’s tournament winnings is like hearing that a person cashed out his stock portfolio for $2 million. If he bought those stocks for $500,000, then I’m impressed. If he spent $5 million on them, then he’s the stock market equivalent of a fish. Tournament winnings are irrelevant without a context. I’d be much more interested in hearing about a tournament player’s profits, and I imagine many people feel the same way.

It’s easy to calculate an online player’s MTT profits. Several websites track every MTT across every major poker site. We know exactly which MTTs a given player entered, whether he cashed, and for how much. Those websites also allow you to combine long-term results from different poker sites so that you know exactly how well someone did across different sites. In short, you can create a very comprehensive player profile of any online MTT professional.

Right now it’s not quite as easy to create that same profile for a live MTT player, although it should be. Every major tournament keeps track of each player who cashed, but I’m not sure that they all keep a note of everyone who entered. Every entrant of every major tournament should be entered into a database, so that we can track how many tournaments a given player has entered and what his total cost has been. Perhaps there is already some such database, but if so I am not aware of it, which means at the very least that it is not marketed well enough.

Information of that sort could give added credibility to the Player of the Year (POY) standings. No matter how prestigious the tournament, I don’t believe anyone deserves to be ranked among the top players of the year for a single tournament win, which is something that happens under the current format. Anyone can run good once. POY implies consistency. I would suggest that someone needs a minimum of five final tables by year’s end to be considered for POY. Not only that, but we should be able to see how many total tournaments each player entered and how much his total entries cost, so we can put a context on his total winnings.

Even if those statistics showed that the number-one player in the standings played more MTTs than anyone and his profits were less than many other players, there is nothing wrong with having him be number one in the rankings. Just like golf and tennis, poker rankings should favor those who put in a greater volume of play.

But as is the case with any of those rankings, you should always take them with a grain of salt. Luke Donald has been the number-one ranked golfer in the world for several months, but with all due respect to him, if you took a poll of who the greatest golfer is in the world, I don’t think too many people would choose Donald. He has played 51 events to earn his number-one place in the rankings, compared to 34 for the number-two player in the world who is, as many people would expect, Tiger Woods.

Similarly, as I write this, Victoria Azarenka was the number-one ranked female tennis player in the world, but number-four ranked Serena Williams just beat her very one-sidedly in the Olympic semifinals. Furthermore, Williams was a 4-to-1 favorite to win that match. It’s not surprising to learn that Williams has played only 15 tournaments this year, less than any other player in the entire top 15. The bottom line is that rankings are made to reward not just consistent success but also volume of play.

That has generally been the case for the Online POY standings. Since online tournament professionals play a huge volume of MTTs, their results are a much better indicator of their overall skill level and consistency. For example, if you look at past online Player of the Year (POY) standings, it’s safe to say that most of the players near the top were consistent winning players. Still, when those standings are published, it would be nice to see not just tournament winnings and number of final tables and wins, but also total number of tournaments played and total profits for the year. Taken altogether, that would provide a much better picture of how well a player performed.

I understand the sex appeal of throwing around million-dollar figures. It’s much more eye-catching to say that a player has $1.5 million career earnings rather than pointing out he has $300,000 in career profits. But as time has passed, the poker community has become more knowledgeable and more serious. Let’s get serious with the way we rate our players as well. ♠

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