The land of the threes

The way tournaments are set up, the winners divide up the total of the buy ins, but the entry fees always go to the house. If there were no entry fees, a 6-max tournament player would break even by coming in first place 1/6th of the time and coming in second place 1/6th of the time. That means finishing in the money one of every three times, which is .333333..., aka the land of the threes. However, there are entry fees, and that changes the minimum requirements for making a profit. Here are the place counts for my tournament career to date:

1    86
2    95
3    94
4    72
5    74
6    48

This means I've finished in the money 181 times in the 469 tournaments I've played, for a winning rate of .385928, well north of the land of the threes. The tyranny of entry fees is easy to illustrate. When I first started playing sit and gos, PokerStars charged a small entry fee of $800 for a $50,000 buy in. That's only 1.6%. These days, PokerStars charges a whopping $5,000 entry fee for a $45,000 buy in. That's 11.11%! If I had played all my tournaments using the old structure, my profit would have been $2,919,800. If I had played all my tournaments using the new structure, my profit would only have been $620,500. So far, I'm proving to myself that I'm good enough to make a profit playing sit and gos, even with exorbitant entry fees. That's a very satisfying realization :-)

buy_in entry_fee num_players num_hands place winnings

 45000      5000           6        38     2    94500
 45000      5000           6        39     1   175500
 45000      5000           6         5     6        0
 45000      5000           6        36     1   175500
 45000      5000           6         6     5        0
 45000      5000           6        44     4        0
 45000      5000           6        37     2    94500
 45000      5000           6        15     3        0

delta: $140,000
tournament balance: $2,697,090
balance: $9,579,789