Late regging so close to the end of reg offers no benefits, in my opinion. At least none that I can see. Saving time is not a real benefit. Are you here to play the game or to revel in the thrills of min cashing? Min cashing should not be seen as success. It is really only a hair better than being the bubble boy. Sure, it makes you feel good, like you played well enough to cash, but in the long run--which is what this game is all about--you are very rarely, if ever, going to make it to the final table, where all the
real money is.
I have only ever made a final table by reging super late once, and it was all because of two very lucky hands. There just isn't enough time to build a stack, and unless your entire strategy is to hope for AA and also hope that they hold up in a multi way pot big enough to boost you up to average stack size, there is no real effective way--other than pure luck--to build a decent or healthy stack from ten blinds or less. With only ten blinds or less, you will almost never be able to do things like steal blinds or take a line post flop to showdown, which really only leaves you with the one option: jamming all in with something good/decent before your tiny stack is eaten up and blinded off in just a couple orbits.
The vast majority of the times when I made final tables, I started within the first half hour to hour of 3 hour reg period games. For those turbos with 90 minutes, anything more than half an hour is usually too late for me. I often look at the average stack size and the blind level to see if my entry size stack is just too small to be given a decent chance to build up within the amount of reg time left. In some of the smaller field games, you can enter pretty late while still having an okay chance with the entry stack. So I guess it just depends.
Some people like entering much later, and they might have some decent luck in that strategy. But I have doubts that they are ever doing much better than min cash. Keep in mind that you have to make the final table just for the chance to win 2% or more of the prize pool, and the min cashes start at 1% or less. Winning one mtt every 100 games is better than min cashing with more frequency over those same 100 games while never making a FT.
Lets say you have an ITM% of 20%, and you play the $2 entry 1k/1.5k gtd game each day--so starting roll here is $200 (doing this without the 10% rake fee to round off the numbers). You get about $40 profit from the 20 min cashes--with gross being about $80 when min cash is double the entry--while the other 80 games you did not cash in cost you about 160. That would leave you with $80 in your roll, and you would have netted $40 in profit.
Now take the other player who, lets say, has an ITM% of 10%, but he/she also wins a tournament about once in ever 100 games, on average. The 10% cash--lets say all but the win are min cashes--amounts to a gross of about $40 and a net profit of $20, while the one average win per 100 games amounts to about $250 to $300, depending on the actual prize pool amount. The 90 games he/she did not cash in amounts to -$180. So lets say this player wins one tournament, and min cahses in the other 9 games of the 10% ITM over 100 games. 9 games x ($2 buy in + $2 pay out) = $36 (gross)/$18 (net). Now add that to the one game the player wins ($250 to $300 gross, $248 to $298 net), and you have about $286 to $336 (gross)/$266 to $316 (net) from those 100 games. Now subtract the losses of $180, and you are left with $106 to $156 (gross)/$86 to $136 (net).
Notice how the delta between gross and net for the second player is much, much smaller than that of the first player/min casher. This is because of the gross total of winnings ($286 to $336) only having an overhead of $20, a mere 14.3% to 16.8% of the gross total, while the min casher's gross total has an overhead of $40, which is 50% of their gross total of $80.
The first player netted $40, while the second player netted $104 to $154, depending on the prize pool amount of their one mtt win, as the daily game in question varies from 1k to 1.5k depending on the day of the week.
This crude and simple example shows you how big a difference there can be. The player who takes more risks but spreads them out over a longer period of time in order to build a bigger, healthier stack, presumably by entering the game sooner than later, is in a better position to earn more from their winnings, even while having half the ITM%, cashing half as often as the other player, who is consolidating their risk by needing to at least double, if not triple up in a very short period of time just to have a chance to min cash. It also demonstrates why all of the advice from pros and winning players is to enter early and go for the win, rather than entering late and/or settling for a higher frequency of min cashes; they know from experience that going for the win is the best way to go if you want to be a winning player in the long run, and going for the win is much easier to do when you start as close to the beginning of the game as possible.
R RUN HOT and it doesnt matter
