Thinner tournaments considered harmful

A thin tournament is one that doesn't have a large number of entries. Thin tournaments have smaller prize pools, fewer paid places, and smaller payouts. A trifecta of good reasons not to enter them! The only way to ensure that you don't enter a thin tournament is to postpone entering it until it has grown fat :-)

This is an excerpt from my June 10, 2021 post. On PokerStars, the number of entries is usually in inverse proportion to the buy in. The smaller the buy in, the larger the number of entries, as a general rule. So far this year, and for most of last year, I've only played in tournaments with a buy in of $50,000 or $100,000. I got curious to compare how well I do in these. I just ran this year's numbers and was surprised to see that my balance for the $100,000 buy in tournaments is in the red. Here are the numbers:

  balance    buy in  tournaments
==========  ======== ===========
$3,376,000   $50,000         502
 $-371,000  $100,000          47

I've played in far fewer $100,000 buy in tournaments, but the writing is on the wall. I'll restrict myself to the $50,000 buy in tournaments going forward.

style flavor buy_in  entry players entries paid place winnings

MTT   NLHE    88000  12000       9     239   63    72        0
MTT   NLHE    44000   6000       9     359   99    68    96000

delta: $-54,000
2024 balance: $3,005,000
2024 blue distance: $72,000
balance: $15,814,303
MTT NLHE ITM pct: 41.50 (1215 of 2928)