Interesting !

As most of you are probably aware by now I play a lot of poker but only at low buy ins.

I decided to try MTTs at slightly higher buy ins to see what difference there was in the player's skills. (NLHE).

I played an $11 MTT on Stars and, as I normally do, checked out the stats of the other players at my table. There were only two with positive ROIs and the rest had pretty pathetic figures. Most of the players, like myself, normally played lower level tournies.
The tourney played pretty much the same as a $3 buy in.

Played a $16.50 MTT and, once again, checked out the other player's stats.
The figures were, to me, amazing.
NONE of the players at the table (apart from myself) had a positive ROI.
MOST of the players normally played at higher buy ins. One guy had prizes of $36,000 but still had an ROI of -21%.
Some of the players were playing $300 to $1000 buy ins which, by analyzing their figures, you could see were way above them.
The tourney, in the opening hour, played worse than a $1 tourney. Some of the players were hopeless.

So, my questions are.. Is this normal or did I just hit weak opening tables ?
Do people play high buy in tournies (when their skill doesn't appear to warrent it) because they have too much money or they are just hoping to get lucky ?
And, I know this has been asked before, at what level can one expect a significant increase in skill ?

I think that on a site like Stars that you might not see the kind of stats that you were expecting because sometimes it is just people who are a little better off and can afford to throw more money away. Tipically you will only see a decrease in the allin preflop i myself have not played many high dollar tourneys as you would say but i do know that there are morons every where you go i might make a suggestion about a site and i dont know if i am aloud to do this so if the admin is watching and i am not my appoligies it will not happen again but i suggest you to go to www.sharkscope.com it is a wonderful site for finding sit and go tourneys with the biggest fish in the poker world it actually tells you about the tourneys and there overal skill raiting of the registered players check it out sometime

Mate I thank you for the reply but I tried sharkscope and found their figures (in relation to myself) way off.

Official PokerRankings has me ranked at about 14,500th of 670,000 players on Stars but Sharkscope had me up over the 100,000. I realise OPR are only for MTTs but I wouldn't have thought my ring and STT stats could have made the large difference.

The level you play isn't proportional to the amount of fish there is. The wsop main event is full of fish, the bigger sunday tournaments have loads of fish (mainly due to most of the players usually coming from qualifiers).

There is fish everywhere and that is why we good players have the advantage.