Calistri's Corner

Much ado was made this year about Harrah’s flattening the payout structure for the main event.  And that indeed is a good thing.  But if you played any of the preliminary lower buy-in events this year, on average fewer people in your field were paid when compared to last year - and you paid more juice than last year.  Kudos to Change 100 for being the sparky one and figuring out there was something amiss with the Ladies event this year.

If you played last year’s Ladies event, you paid 9% juice.  This year you paid 10%.  That is also true for all the $1500 and under events.  Last year’s Ladies event had 1128 players and paid 101 players.  This year’s field had more players, 1286, and they paid only 99 players.  At first I thought that Harrah’s made a mistake with the payout calculation for the the Ladies event.  But then I realized the same was true for for many of the $1500 buy-in events. It was also true for the $1000 seniors.  I noticed payout percentages were fine for the $5K and over events.  I started to think that the cheaper buy-ins just had a different payout structre.  But then I notcied some of the $1500s were fine; like the the seven card stud, the razz and the pot limit omaha hi/lo.  It took me forever to find the payout structure for the 2007 WSOP - and it was then I realized that the structure has a break in payouts for fields larger than 1000 players.

For example, 27 players (or three tables of nine) get paid for fields between 200-299, 36 players (or four tables of nine) get paid for fields between 300-399, and so it goes in 100 player increments.  So if you played in a field of 300 players, 36 players got paid or 12% of the field.  If your field was 399 players, 36 players got paid or just over 9% of the field.  But the 100 player increments stop at 1000 and increase to 500 player increments.  If you played in a field of 1000-1499, 99 players (or eleven tables of nine got paid.  If you played in a field of 1000 players, 99 got paid or 9.9% of the field.  But if you played in a field of 1499, 99 got paid or just 6.6% of the field.  

Because the payout structure shifts from 100 player increments to 500 player increments at fields greater than 1000 players, there is far more variance in the percentage of the payout structure and sub 8% payout results are common.  And there is really no need for it.  It’s not like computing the payouts for larger fields is any more complex than smaller fields.  If you can’t multiply by nine, it’s in the damn tournament software.

I had a choice this year to play one cheap event.  I was toying with the PLO8, which I finally played, and one of the larger field NLHE events.  I had assumed that on a strictly percentage payout basis, the two events would be more or less equal.  Lucky for me, I suck at NLHE and am better at PLO8.  The event I might have played paid out 8.12% of the field.  The event I ended up playing, because it was a field less than 1000 players, paid out 9.17%. 

Well perhaps in my case it didn’t matter.  After all, dead money is dead money.        

This entry was posted on Friday, July 6th, 2007 at 8:12 am and is filed under Uncategorized.