Choosing stakes to play tournaments

[StealTheButton]

I've been playing daily for the past few weeks, like 5-10 STT per day. I've been grinding to help pay for some recent expenses. Not much is talked about the strategy of choosing buy in's to play, except move up when you have conquered your current level. I have said before that I do better at higher stakes, which I'm not sure if it makes sense. At $5 buy in there are a lot of passive players. At $10 there are more loose aggresive players and it just feels like more of a crap shoot. At $20 there are a lot more aggressive players, but there play is logical and I seem to do best.

I'm looking at my results per buy-in this month and I am shocked. I typically play one $10 and one $20 tourney at one time, and when I finish those I buy in two more again, so the ratio I have played them is just about 1 : 1. Looking at these results I don't know if I should try and adjust my strategy at the $10 tables, play all $20's, play $5, or move up in stakes. The only $5 I have played have been free tourney tickets. I feel like monkeys playing could have gotten better results in the $10 stakes. This is a small sample, maybe 50 tourneys per buy in, but still; the results should not be this far apart. This is a ranking strictly by profit only- number 1 being the most earned in profit for that stake.

 

[fundiver199]

This is a small sample, maybe 50 tourneys per buy in, but still; the results should not be this far apart.

Over just 50 tourneys variance completely dominate over skill edges. So there is nothing surpricing or unusualy about your results. You can use the variance calculator at Pokerdope.com to get an idea about, what to expect:

Tournament Variance Calculator

Poker Tournament Variance Simulator – calculates variance for poker tournaments, MTTs and SNGs.

www.primedope.com

 

[Andyreas]

Over just 50 tourneys variance completely dominate over skill edges.

But also for STTs?

There's still quite a bit of variance but from my personal feeling, 50 is quite a decent size for SnGS. Or am I wrong?

I checked the site but have to dive into the numbers before being able to come up with a proper result.

I feel like monkeys playing could have gotten better results in the $10 stakes.

Don't go too hard on you. 😅

How many games have you played here for the $10?

But indeed if you play (very) tight and those LAGs are able to take advantage of it, maybe see if you can make slight adjustments to your play or as you said, leave out the $10 and just play $5 and $20.

 

[fundiver199]

But also for STTs? There's still quite a bit of variance but from my personal feeling, 50 is quite a decent size for SnGS. Or am I wrong?

If we plug in 6 players, 2 places paying, 9% rake, an ROI of 5%, which is realistic for winning players in STTs, and a sample size of 50, then the 70% confidence interval, which the software comes up with, is an ROI of -17% - +27%. Meaning that in 15% of all samples the ROI of this long term winning player will be worse than -17%, and in another 15% of all samples it will be higher than +27%. And this is clearly way to much variance to even begin to look at, if you are doing better in one game compared to another.

OP has an open sharkscope profile, and since I just purchased one month of subscription for $16, I can actually share his life time results for the PokerStarsPA site, and they are as follow:

$5 turbo 6-man SnG 1.189 games +1.863$ ROI 31,3%
$10 turbo 6-man SnG 3.062 games +4.522$ ROI 14,8%
$20 turbo 6-man SnG 1.933 games +3.143$ ROI 8,1%

So over these larger samples his ROI does actually drop, as he moves up, which is exactly, what we should expect, since the quality of play will tend to increase with stakes. Moreover his results are absolutely fantastic for any format of STTs, which is likely an indication of extremely soft games, especially at the $5 limit. Only players from Pensylvania can play on this site, and that create a whole different environment compared to the international pokerstars site, where we have to deal with an endless array of professional and semiprofessional players from Eastern Europe and South America even in the micros.

Its also interesting to note, that OPs results were even better from january 2020, when he started playing, until may 2021. Since then he have still been winning but at a much lower rate. This actually makes a ton of sense, because it coincide with the time, where online games were unusually soft due to COVID-19 and lockdowns. I also had my best results in online poker during this time frame. So OP and everyone else just need to accept, that the time of extremely easy money is gone, and from now on it is again going to be much harder work to win in online poker