Earning Money in Multi-Table Poker Tournaments
Tournaments are the life and blood of poker. Most new poker players are attracted to tournament poker. And events such as the WSOP and EPT have proliferated the glitz and glamour of poker around the world.
However the question over how much you can expect to make playing tournaments has always been speculated. To first answer this, we must identify how we can calculate our tournament earnings.
Cash game players have traditionally been able to measure their success and profitability through the famous BB/100 scenario (i.e. how many big blinds they win per 100 hands sitting at the tables) or BB/hour (how many big blinds they win per hour).
However in tournaments a different calculations/formula is required. This takes the shape of either your ROI (return on investment) or ITM (In the money finish). Your ROI can be calculated by your average profit rate from each tournament. If you play tournaments and earn an average profit of , then your ROI would be 10%. In conclusion, this method is the most widely used for measuring someone’s success in tournaments because it shows how profitable they are on average.
ICM %, on the other hand, is an entirely different method of calculating your success in tournaments. Rather than calculating your average profitability, it instead shows how successful you are a finishing “in the money” in tournaments on average (that is, in what percentage of games you finish high enough to receive a payoff).
Both of these methods have their advantages and disadvantages. For example, your ROI can vary significantly if the payoff structure for a tournament is top heavy. As well as this, your ROI is a percentage of your entry fee, and doesn’t really paint a true picture of how much someone is earning altogether (for example a 30% ROI in a MTT could be worse than a 10% ROI in a MTT).
Of course this question depends highly on a number of factors including poker tournament strategy, field sizes, how often you play, tournament structures, and tournament stakes. However we can definitely provide realistic projections for how much you can make, through some simple observations and the calculations above.
A completely new beginner who brushes up on basic tournament strategy can expect 10% ROI in the long-term. If he plays only 5 x games per week (around 260 per year), he can expect to earn /year.
A good player can expect to earn 20% in MTTs. If he plays 10 x games per week (around 540 games per year; with a total of ,000 in entry fees), he will earn around ,400/year.
A professional poker player can earn up to 50% ROI in tournaments. In 30 games per week at the higher 0 buy-in level, he can make ,000/yr.
Find where to play the best value overlay poker tournaments here.
