Friday, 29th March 2024 14:48
Home / Poker / What does a poker tournament look like halfway through?

Last night in Paris, the PokerStars PR team brought a group of journalists and influencers to the European Poker Tour (EPT) tournament room and invited them to watch the action for the first time.

These were people who had made their name in other fields, who were new to this strange world of high stakes tournament poker. Much of what they experienced left them with their mouths agape — they watched a drawn-out bubble burst in the Main Event, for example — and that’s a common feeling for people on their first trip to a poker room.

Although people close to poker know all about the twists and turns, such a lot of what we see every day is actually pretty bizarre. And today at EPT Paris we got another example of that with the EPT Main Event hitting its halfway point.

Sho Homma on the EPT Paris bubble

But what does a poker tournament look like when it’s halfway through? How do we even define that? Let’s take a quick look and try to explain a few things.

HOW LONG IS A PIECE OF STRING?

On the face of it, it might seem like a fair question to ask when a poker tournament is going to end. You can do that with most sporting events, for example, and get a reasonable answer.

However, poker tournaments end when there’s only one player left. And there are so many variables that affect the timing of that that it’s impossible to ever really predict when the tournament will be done.

That said, we can have a pretty good guess. Based on previous EPT Main Events, which have the same structure as this one, we know that the tournament will probably end somewhere around Level 33-36. And so our halfway point is right about now, with the tournament now into Level 18.

WHAT’S THE STATE OF PLAY?

At a randomly selected point of Level 18 at EPT Paris, the tournament information board shows the following:

Players: 121/1,606
Average: 398,182
Blinds: 4,000/8,000 – 8,000

The first thing we can notice, therefore, is that far less than half the field will reach a poker tournament’s halfway point.

There were 1,606 entries to the EPT Paris Main Event, including 447 re-entries. That meant there were 1,159 “unique” players.

However, although we’re now halfway through, only 10 percent of those unique players are still left. It’s far from the 50 percent that might seem intuitive.

That’s because players are eliminated from a poker tournament at what might seem a hugely imbalanced rate.

HOW QUICKLY DO THEY GET KNOCKED OUT?

When registration is still open (i.e., through Days 1A and 1B), players might be knocked out, but they can also re-enter, so the player numbers can go both up and down. However, as soon as registration is closed, the player numbers will only reduce — and floods at the start eventually become a trickle.

Toby Stone, EPT tournament director, says that by the end of Level 8, 50 percent of entries will be already out. By the end of Level 10, only 35 percent will remain. And then by the start of Level 14, about 20 percent will be left.

The bubble bursts when 15 percent of the field remains, so we can usually predict that will take place around Level 15. Here in Paris, that’s precisely when it happened.

This rate of attrition, which at first seems impossible to chart, is actually amazingly consistent. When a tournament gets to fewer than 100 players, roughly half the field is eliminated every three levels.

This helps tournament directors figure out how much space they’ll have in a tournament room to schedule other tournaments. (And it helps weary tournament reporters know when they might get to see their beds.)

ON THE SUBJECT OF SPACE…

One of the other things that always happens by the time a main event hits its halfway point is that it now looks very, very small.

At the beginning of both Day 1s, and especially at the start of Day 2, the Main Event lives up to its billing. The tournament room, regardless of how big it is, will be dominated by Main Event tables.

But by the halfway point, when there are only one tenth of the tables remaining, the Main Event will likely be fenced off in a much smaller area while one or more other monster field side event gets going.

Plenty of room gets cleared by Day 3

In today’s case, it’s the €3,000 Mystery Bounty, a 787-entry tournament that went into Day 2, and the €1K Single Re-entry event, which is certain to get a 500+ field, and starts at 4pm.

So even though the Main Event is getting far more tense, more dramatic and far richer, its stature in purely physical terms is much diminished.

BIG PAYOUTS, BUT BIGGER TO COME

If you make it to the halfway point in a poker tournament, you’re pretty much guaranteed to be in the money. As we have established, typically 15 percent of the field gets paid, but only about 10 percent of players will make it this far.

In Paris, everyone still involved at the start of Level 18 was guaranteed at least €12,250.

However, poker payout structures increase much more steeply the further you get in a tournament. If you make it to the top 5 percent, you’ll get more than €21K. If you make it to the top 1 percent, you get closer to €50K.

There’s no disputing that the halfway point is a great target at the start of the tournament. But if you make it this far, you really want to be cracking on even longer.

More about EPT Paris:

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