How to estimate a tournament duration

Hi everyone, unibet provides an approximative duration of a tournament with a slight margin of error, therefore, there must be a formula to calculate the duration of a tournament. Does anyone knows this formula? Please, we know we can look up previous similar tournaments and get an estimation, sometimes we dont have access to that information, hence me asking for anyone who doesnt know the formula to abstain from replying to this thread.
Thanks and Merry Yule

There is no exact formula. To estimate the duration of a tournament, we need to know: The total number of chips players have in the tournament (including rebuys and addons) and the structure of the blind (duration of levels). We assume that at the end there will be two players who will have stacks of only a few blinds.

For example: players have 1,200,000 chips in total. Heads-Up will come, for example, when the blind are 30k / 60k. Or 40k / 80k, or even 50k / 100k ... Something like this ... We look at the duration of the levels and calculate how long the game will take before such bets (we add five-minute breaks every hour).

We will not get the absolute exact time, but we will be able to estimate the duration of the game plus or minus 1-2 levels of the blind.

Estimate the total number of chips in play. When the tournament finishes there will be around 40BB in play give or take. So divide the total chips by 40 and see when the blinds reach that amount.

I would assume sites that do this are using data from previous games that are either the same or have similar structures/guarantees.
Without that info though, Andrew and Perrypip give the best method for doing this, and you can make reasonably good estimations by calculating the total number of chips in play heads-up and estimating how deep play will be at this stage based on the structure.

I think it would be very useful for other sites to add this estimate like Unibet do. At times I will only have say 4 hours to play and it can be hard to know if a tournament would finish in that time, as it's difficult to estimate the total chips as you don't know how many late registrations/add-ons/rebuys there will be. The sites would have data on the usual total chips for the tournament so could make a much better estimate than we can.

SharkFinn said:

I think it would be very useful for other sites to add this estimate like Unibet do. At times I will only have say 4 hours to play and it can be hard to know if a tournament would finish in that time, as it's difficult to estimate the total chips as you don't know how many late registrations/add-ons/rebuys there will be. The sites would have data on the usual total chips for the tournament so could make a much better estimate than we can.

Click to expand...

Average cardchat tournament lasts 4+ hours though (atleast on sites where are 10 min blinds) ...

Risto234 said:

Average cardchat tournament lasts 4+ hours though (atleast on sites where are 10 min blinds) ...

Click to expand...

I meant it would be useful for the poker rooms to do it for all tournaments, not specifically the cardchat ones

SharkFinn said:

I meant it would be useful for the poker rooms to do it for all tournaments, not specifically the cardchat ones

Click to expand...

Also Unibet time estimate thing is sometimes miles off.
Like recently i played some qualifier tournament which estimated time was like over 1 hour i think ... In reality that particular game was over in less than 10 (or even 5) minutes haha

As said before, the estimation is probably based on previous data that only those websites have. I don't think there's a formula for that.

There is no formula for calculating the duration of a tournament. It is clear here that the duration largely depends on the players themselves and their number of participants in the tournament. The duration can only be predicted approximately.

Depends on the level of bins. The tournament is longer for large ones and for a large prize pool with low entry prices.

peaceofcoke said:

Hi everyone, Unibet provides an approximative duration of a tournament with a slight margin of error, therefore, there must be a formula to calculate the duration of a tournament. Does anyone knows this formula? Please, we know we can look up previous similar tournaments and get an estimation, sometimes we dont have access to that information, hence me asking for anyone who doesnt know the formula to abstain from replying to this thread.
Thanks and Merry Yule

Click to expand...

I played tournaments that last almost 10 hours on pokerstars

jake coady said:

I played tournaments that last almost 10 hours on pokerstars

Click to expand...

Yes, I am aware of the tournaments that lasts over 10 hours, I was hoping to get an idea of how to calculate a freezout tournament potential duration.