How Often Would The Strongest Player Make The Final Table? - My estimate

How Often Would The Strongest Player Make The Final Table in the $11 Deep Stack on Stars?
There are on average around 1500 players in it which means the average player would get to the final table 9/1500 of the time which is 0.6%.

A player has to double his stack 7 or 8 times to get to the final table.
Assuming it is 8 times for the best player: say they are 75% chance to survive the first 4 double ups then 65% to survive the last 4.

This means probability for the best player making final table =
0.75^4 x 0.65^4 = 5%
So I think the best player out there should make the final table around 5% or 1 in 20 times.
Do you think this estimate is reasonable?

It's impossible to mathematically quantify but it's definitely less than 5% unless "the best player" is a superuser or ten times better than anyone else or something. At a guess (which is really the best anyone without the will to analyse thousands of tourney histories from good players can come up with) I'd say maybe 2%, 3% at most, but it's just a guess. Why do you ask?

I like your approach, but I think perhaps you are focusing too much on the hard math here and it will be a fuzzy math thing at best.

It would be easy to use your original numbers to expect ITM finishes, and for a better player 5% ITM isn't all that good, but ITM and Final Table are a whole different game than what or how the tourney starts.

As a guess, I would guess that the best player vs the average worst player in a tourney would start at a 65% advantage to the best player, not a 100% advantage as I am thinking you are assuming up front.

As the tourney progresses, like say 1 hour in, I would again guess that the advantage has dropped below 60%, and by the bubble I'd put it under 55% advantage to the best player in any single hand he got involved in.

My thinking here incorporates luck observed via experience, and forces a moderation on any hard numbers that would exist in a perfect poker environment.

I think that is some fuzzy math as well. Just search pokerdb and that will give you an example of FT %

Poker doesn't work like that. It's not all about the double ups.
And I don't think it's remotely likely that you can be 75% (on average) to win in each of your first four double-ups.

My calculation doesn't assume 100% advantage at any point, just a 75% advantage for the best player. I don't think thats unreasonable at the start for an excellent player playing small ball type poker. I understand that later on 75% or 65% might be a slight overestimate, but I wouldn't have thought it that far over the mark. Do you not think someone like Phil Ivey or Daniel Negreanu would have a 65% edge over the average player deep into the tournament? 55% seems very slender.

It only lists the tournaments cashes not the tournaments where a player finishes outside the money which means you can't really analyze the stats.

Looking Up My Own Stats I have finished ITM 12 out of 49 $11 deep stack tournaments I've played which is about 25%.
14-15% of players are ITM which by my estimate means the best player should be ITM about 40% of the time or slightly under (75%^3 TO FINISH IN TOP 12.5%)
I don't see this as unreasonable as I'm not that amazing , and I have tilted and played like a donkey at quite a few times in these 49 tournaments.
If I played at my best all the time I'm sure I would be above 30% ITM, and for a better player than me surely near enough 40% would be attainable.

1 problem I see right away:
Your stats are good for finishing itm. But I don't know if that's your goal. Others may have different goals and therefore don't play to make the money, they play for 1st.
It really is different. Some play to make the money as their immediate goal then work on making ft. Some take those extra risks to accumulate a stack to make the ft and eventually 1st.

Play and goals really do vary imo.

I agree with Storm...One more thing though...you can never escape that you're playing with human beings ( at least most of the time!). They are totally unpredictable and may be 'on tilt' at times. Or you may be playing against an inexperienced player, such as myself, who plays according to how I feel things are going at the time. Math is great, but always add in that human factor too!

It shows stats for all tournaments played.

I don't think it is possible to count that. You won't get the same cards all the time, you won't play them same way... It is impossible...

Sorry. You're right. Just looked at it earlier, and I didn't notice see you could look up every tournament before.

The only way you can get anywhere near 75% to win an all-in is if you spend most of your time getting it with AA versus KK (or KK vs. QQ) and not once get it in with QQ vs. AK, or even worse - get it in as a dog (with, say, KK vs. AA). In fact, there should be times when you get it in with significantly less than 50% equity when called. If that never happens, then you're not doing it right.

...dont think its at all pssible to get a figure on % of final table...you mentioned your lef uve made 25% itm, and think it could be 30%...but this says nothing of how many ft's, prob very little since u didnt mention it ( :-) )

but as storm says, people have different appraches to being in money...i personally very very rarely make it just outside the money,...I dont sit tight and wait for a small cash..i aim for 1st, and if nnot, then 2nd...i dont sit bak and wait for itm...even if i did, it would completely mess up the % of ft

Speaking of the best player making a final table, did anyone see Phil Ivey muck the winning flush in a check check showdown on the river? I don't know if I've ever seen anyone do that before on such a big stage with every pot being so important, little lone "the best player in the world."

Yeah dont know where the math comes from. Seams rather random. Course it explains why i dont make many final tables, since i "think" im the best in many tourneys i play,

i think that your assumptions are flawed here

Why??

totally agree with what savagepenguin says here

So you don't think Phil Ivey could convert a 5000 chips stack to 10000 at least 75% of the time against a table of average players and donks on Stars, in a deep stack tournament. I can probably do that at the start.
I think you'd see a lot less pros making a living at the game if his edge were a lot less than that.

I am not sure if pros or anyone special play that tournament but i would definately think the best player that plays that tournament would make the final table more then just 1/20 or 5%. I would say about 10% or 1/10. Not all the players in the tournament are good, many could be beginners, as beginners actually play almost any stake. Given the bad beats and just bad luck, i would still have to say more than 5% because that is definately a low number.

i think a good player can expect to cash up to 12% of the tourneys one is playing... yet for FT you just cant say...

I personally dont play that many tourneys but when I cash I really go deep because theres no point for me to barely make it in the money...

So what are the odds of a strong player not only reaching the final table of the WSOP, but also winning it? What are the odds of this same player doing it 3 times?

Could it ever be done?

The best players online get aout 75% cash rates in MTT's. About 15-25% of these are probably final tables?? There is no mathematical way to work out someones abolity to cash, as luck is a factor involved, which you can relate to as a %, which means your missing that from your equation, which makes it bs, sorry...

BS back to you. I have taken the luck factor into account by saying the best player will double up 75% of the time. If there was no luck involved tehy would just double up 100% of the time.

I'm not sure your assumptions are well founded.

Given that your assumptions are correct, then the answer you derive is also correct.

However I'm not sure how accurate your assumptions are. I'm not saying they are wrong, I'm saying that in order to use this line of reasoning you have to show that your assumptions are accurate.

That in itself is quite difficult. How do you rate and rank players? How do you first identify the strongest player in the world? How do you compare him to the second strongest player, and the third and so on? Can you simply assign points to their ranking or is the difference in skill between the third and fourth player, for instance, different to the difference between the 9th and tenth?

So firstly how do you identify the strongest player?

How do you then take into account the strength of the field?

Thirdly how do you aproximate the luck throughout the field? For instance, if the weakest player has a very good run of cards, would that have as much impact as the second strongest having the same run?

Position, seats are randomly assigned, however how many tournaments are required before seat allocation enters into the long run?

There are other things to consider too.

I just think its too complex a situation to accurately model and sweeping approximations make the results a bit meaningless.

I thought I'd write this little anecdote.

When I was studying economics at college, I was taught by two very intelligent economists. One was a brilliant teacher and a great economic thinker. His maths however was not so good. Therefore he placed an over emphasis mathematical results. If the answer was 7.69 or 7.94 then to him that was important. (I think he was just impressed when people calculated stuff!!)

The other was a fantastic mathematician and had studied at the London School of Economics (probably the best place for economics i the world).

His view of mathematical results was different. Because economics attempts to abstractly model the world, all models contain a high degree of approximation. Therefore any answer obtained is also an approximation.

Therefore he really wasn't interested in the actual results, he was instead interested in the order of magnitude between results. If an answer was 7.23 and another 9.4, then as they were approximations, it meant that they were roughly the same. If another was 7523 then clearly this was a much bigger value and that should be noted, but its exact value wasn't all that important.

The results were really only useful when comparing their orders of magnitude to other results obtained in the same manner.

So when you come up with an answer of 2% or 5% or 1.3%, don't put too much stock in the answer itself, because in isolation its meaningless.

It is showing that even a the strong player is unlikely to win, which fits with what most people would assume anyway.

Its not based on assumptions that are accurate enough to be any more precise than 'small chance'