What I would like to determine (roughly) is this: What is the statistical correlation between tournament winnings and stack-size midway through the tournament?

The reason I think this value is important is that it should tell you just how important growth is early on in a tournament, hence what kinds of risks are worth taking in order to gain a dramatic increase in stack-size.

So, if anyone else is interested in this, perhaps the best way to approach it before presenting actual results to the forum (I’m posting this on UPF and livepokerforum) is to PM me, and I’ll fill in those interested on details. What I’d really like to get are as many players as possible who are just willing to go through their tournaments in pokertracker and find out what their stack size was going into the first break and then how much money they won, if any. It is important that ALL tournament results be there, not just selective data. If someone is interested but has more tournaments than they want to go through in detail, then it would be fine to pick something like at least 20 (more is of course better) consecutive tournaments that seem fairly representative in terms of one’s own results.

My own results are going to be exclusively from Stars and largely from 18-player SNGs. I don’t think I have enough big tournaments under my belt personally in order for the results to be statistically relevant. Anyhow, if this post spawns any interest, please just PM me, and I’ll fill you in on what data I would actually need in order to “normalize” the results. Just as an example: One has to be able to compare $200 buy-in tournaments with $1 buy-in tournaments—that’s an easy one to do (just divide winnings in proportion to buy-in), but I think blind structures and number of players in the tournament are also going to be relevant. As to the latter, I would assume that a big stack halfway through an 18-player SNG has a lot more actual value than a big stack halfway through a tournament with 2,000 players in it. Without having even gone through my own data yet, I can pretty clearly say that in the big tournaments, I think there’s almost no correlation between my winnings and even just a decent stack-size (on my best result to date, I think I had slightly less than my initial stack at midway).

Anyhow, I’ll post whatever I can come up with (if anyone here is good at statistics, organizational/statistical help would also be great) as soon as I get through whatever data I can get my hands on (possibly a few weeks, depending on how much interest this generates as well as the difficulty of sorting through the data).

Ais - I've got a few hundred tournament histories that I could pore through, but there are some caveats.

1. Most of them are Omaha Hi/Lo and limit
2. The second most populous are Limit hold'em
3. The third is NL tournaments.

Also, if you want any SNG histories - I've got a few hundred of those too, though only around 50 18-player SNGs and again, the bulk of these are Omaha Hi/Lo.

If you do want the data, let me know what you need exactly, and what kind of format would be best (tournamentid, buyin, stack @ each break (if applicable), number of players, site, and finishing placement?). I imagine a spreadsheet would be fine for this, but I could just set it up as a CSV if you would rather that.

Let me know.

/d

I'll post this here for the moment rather than as PM so that any others who may be interested will have some kind of idea what I'm trying to do.

My own results are restricted to NLHE, and I think I'd rather just keep it at that (I just selfishlessly really don't want to do the work on games that I don't myself play).

The categories you mentioned (tourney ID, etc.) are all exactly the ones I was thinking. I'm not going to track the thing through every break at the moment, but just take the stack going into the first break as the time to check stack size.

AND (and this is the big news!) when I started going through this stuff last night after posting, I made a few interesting discoveries:

First, I have the data not only on me but on every player at the table I was sitting at first break (for those tourneys where I made it that far--if not, one doesn't even have to worry about the data). So, I don't just have my own stack size relative to results but also that on 8 other players for each tourney reviewed.

But, by the same token, I also don't necessarily have the stack sizes of all the top places (only those people sitting at my table) and midway. However, whatever cross-section I get will have results not only for me but for a lot of other people.

As to format, I've just been doing an Excel spreadsheet, as was your idea. I'll be happy to email it to you, if you like, so we'll have the same format going.

At the moment, I'm just going through the 18-player SNGs (NLHE). For the moment, I think it's not a bad idea to just view that as a different project than on MTTs.

Oh, and one other note on working in poker tracker: If I finish below 9th place, then I just skip over the tournament (put it in on the first one but then realized that it's just irrelevant, since I have no data on other players, and, obviously, with a stack size of 0 at midway, I never make money--surprize!). But, if I finish at 9th or better, then, under "tourney notes," you can double click on the tourney itself to filter down the results only for that one tourney. Then, under "game notes," you just go to the first game played at the break and check the various stacks of everyone at the table. After entering those players, along with their stack-sizes, in my spreadsheet, then I just have to find out how each player finished (I enter both $ won and place), so I enter that and have the data I need from that particular tourney.

Once I have all the data, what I think I'll do first (as statistical novice) is just take the average midway stack-size for all of the various money places and see if there's any clear pattern. I've already noticed that, although the biggest stack in the few tourneys I've already done has never placed first, first place does usually seem to be a stack well above average. But it's all pretty much just speculation at this point. I could also pretty easily get Excel to figure up standard deviation as well as noting the MINIMUM stack-sizes for all the money finishes.

Well, I've got about 50 NL HE multis I could send the data for - so go ahead and send me the spreadsheet (starstealer @ comcast . net). If I get a chance before the end of the weekend, I'll pass it along.