Hand Advice Post

I think this is an interesting topic for discussion. There has really been surprisingly little said or written about tournament bankrolls and I suspect the reason for this might surprise most people.
 
Supposedly, Sklansky or Malmuth did a calculation some years back and concluded that a tournament player who has an average profit of one buy-in per tournament played needs a bankroll of at least 55 buy-ins to be reasonably certain of not going broke during a bad run.
 
The problem with the 55 buy-in rule of thumb, however, is that it was calculated in a time when the average tournament had far fewer players than tournaments today have. As anyone who has played tournaments for very long quickly figures out, profit or loss is determined much more by how often you reach the final 3 than by how often you make the money. While the odds of making the money are pretty much the same regardless of the size of the tourney, the odds of finishing in the top 3 change dramatically as the size of the field increases.
 
Given that, if an average field when the 55 buy-in rule was calculated was 100 to 200 players, and today the average field is 2 or 3 times that, the bankroll requirement has probably also increased 2 or 3 times. That may not sound too horrible when you're talking about $109 on-line tourneys, but think what it means for playing $10,000 buy-in live tournaments. The bankrolls required to really ensure you don't go broke when running bad becomes astronomical pretty quickly.

Of course, the funny thing about how the math works with all of this is that if you have a "group" playing out of the same bakroll the required number of buy-ins actually goes down and I don't mean it goes down per member of the group, I mean it goes down in total. If 1 player needs 150 buy-ins, 2 players playing out of the same bankroll may only need 120 buy-ins total or 60 buy-ins each. Three players might be 100 buy-ins total or 33 buy-ins each.
 
In thinking about this, it gets pretty easy to understand why you have all these supposed "backers" in tournament poker. The backers in many cases are probably just fronts for groups of players playing out of a common bankroll (by the way, there are income tax advantages in setting up these common bankroll type groups, as well). It sounds better to call them "backers" because it avoids having to address the question of what happens when 2 players who are part of the same group end-up sitting at a table together.

Another way of achieving the same effect would be if, say,  10 players all got together and agreed they would each give 10% of their winnings to the other 9 members of the group. The total required bankroll will drop to a fraction of what it would be for any one of them by themselves and the number per member would, of course, only be 1/10th of that.

I'm not saying these groups are easy to do, however. The 1st real world problem you're going to run into is finding 10 players you're confident are really playing at a positive EV. Then keeping the group together when a few of the members go on an extended bad streak wouldn't be easy either, so in the end I doubt these groups consist of more than 2 or 3 members for very long and even that probably requires some "creative" technigues to keep things together.

I asked Brad Daugherty, author of an AMAZING book, the same question, and here was his response:

..."As for your bankroll, I don't have a specific amount that you need to go up to the larger entry. I feel that if you have 10-15 times the buy-in you can try a few of them. If you are sucessful you can stay with the larger or play both. remember you can always drop back down to a lower buy in." 

Yes, ty double lucky, maybe other can give us their opinions to... thanks again DL 

As I said in my post, your chances of making the money are pretty much the same regardless of the size of the field, but your chances of finishing in the top three go down dramatically when the field doubles and triples. And long-term profit is more a function of how often you finish in the top 3 than how often you finish in the money.

As to your second question, let me try to answer this way. If you are a winning player and you still need 55 buy-ins to be reasonably certain you don't go broke, what are you really protecting against? You're protecting against the really bad run. If you have a 4 person group, what are the chances that all 4 will go on a really bad run at the same time? What are the chances that at least one person will be having a good enough run to offset another players really bad run?
 
What I'm trying to say is that the larger the group the quicker the math gets into the "long-run" and since our group is comprised of all "winning" players the further into the long-run you get, the less chance there is of losing and the less chance there is of losing the fewer the number of buy-in required to keep from going broke.
 
Of course, you're right that there does come a certain point where if the group comprises a large enough portion of the total field that adding new members stops reducing the size of the bankroll needed and at some point wold even begin to increase it again. But in the real world no group would ever get large enough for this to be a problem and over a range of say 2 to 10 in a field of 600 the total required bankroll would go down with each additional member of the group.

I'm getting my math for this from an old book on card-counting teams in blackjack (I beleive it was called "Million Dollar BlackJack by Ken Houston or something like that) and the authors calculation of the total required bankroll for various numbers of team members. It works the same way, if you're playing with an advantage the more members in the team the more quickly you get into the long-run and the more quickly you get into the long-run the less chance there is that a winnig team will be losing.

If 4 people are playing on a smaller bankroll than 1 person by himself, then you don't need 4 people to go on a bad run at the same time.  One person on a bad run and the other 3 breaking even will have the same effect as 1 person on a bad run.

No offense, but I don't think your "math" holds water. 

I can see where if 1 person needs 55 buy-ins then two people would only need 45 each for a total of 90 (instead of 110) for example.  But to say that the two of them combined would only need 45 total is not logical.  If you want to present some actual math to back up your theory, I would love to see it. 

Hey JD, we're just having a conversation here. I'm not trying to win an argument. If you don't want to be believe me, it's fine with me. But I'll give it another shot, because, believe it or not, you're wrong.
 
You have to remember we're dealing with averages. If one person is on a bad run and the other 3 members are winning players, what will 3 winning players be doing on average. They will be winning. That average win lowers the average number of buy-ins needed to achieve a given level of risk of going broke.

Feel free to find a copy of the book I memtioned and check my memory. It's been over 20 years since I read it so I suppose it's possible I've forgotten something (just not likely).