ITM% isn't a great metric for evaluating your play because it depends on a lot of factors.payout structures, skill level you are playing against, and cashing depth. If you are cashing in 20% of your tournaments but most of those are min cashes that's bad. If you are cashing 7% but nearly every one is a FT, that's good.
- The ICM poker term stands for the Independent Chip Model. In poker ICM allows you to convert tournament players stacks in chips into their money equity (as percentage of total or remaining prize pool).
- ITM does not guarantee success in poker, staying in ITM leaves your ROI% very low, you need to play to get FT, when you get 2nd, 3rd, your ROI% increases a lot, and you win many buyin, get ITM only.
(After you read this post, you might want to check out my follow-up to it here.)
I tell a lot of people not to play large-field online MTTs for a living. I’ve always thought that the variance is just way too high for most professionals to trust their livelihood (and sanity) to large-field MTTs instead of cash, smaller-field MTTs, or STTs. But, admittedly, I’ve given this advice without any direct evidence to back it up. I’ve been meaning for a while to see what the numbers say, and this post will be a tentative first step.
Ideally, what I’d like to do is do a nice controlled study where I pick a few representative players based on past results and use their results over the next few months as my data. (Alternatively, I could take the results of one of the large backing groups. If anyone who backs 20+ people would be down to share some information, let me know.) But, that requires more motivation than I’ve been able to muster, so I decided to do a much rougher study: I grabbed Shaun “SFD” Deeb’s tourney results from OPR (with Shaun’s permission) and played around for a few hours. Here’s what I found:
I used Shaun’s results from January 2009 to present on Stars and FTP. I filtered for buy-ins between $55 and $216 and included only NLHE tourneys with at least 181 entrants. OPR doesn’t record rebuys, so I removed rebuy tourneys. This left 3,049 tourneys with an average buy-in of $119.72 in which Deeb earned $294,027 with an awesome ROI of 81% and an ITM of 11.5%. Obviously, not many people can play or run as well as Shaun Deeb, but these results provide a starting point.
Places To Itm Poker
Say you are Shaun Deeb, you really do have an ROI of 81%, and you’re going to play 1,000 of these tourneys. What are the odds you make money? What are the odds you make at least $50k? Etc etc. Here are the results of one thousand Shaun Deebs each playing one thousand tourneys:
In particular, Shaun loses over a 1,000 tournaments sample about 13% of the time, and he makes less than $50k about 35% of the time (with an EV of about $100k). Of course, the upside is pretty good too–He makes over $200k about 14% of the time and over $300k almost 4% of the time.
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Here’s the same data for a larger sample of 3,000 tournaments:
Over 3,000 tourneys, Shaun wins about 98.6% of the time, and he wins over $150k over 82% of the time. He made over $900k once in my 1,000 trials ($915,134) and over $600k about 6% of the time.
But, say you’re not Shaun Deeb. I can make a lower ROI player by simply taking Shaun’s distribution and lowering the payouts. (For an ROI of x, multiply the prizes by (1+x)*0.554 .) This isn’t very accurate, but it’s good enough for my purposes (especially since Shaun has a low ITM%). Here’s the 1,000 tourney histogram for a 20% ROI player:
As you can see, the situation is way worse. This player loses about 45% of the time and loses over $50,000 about 7% of the time. That’s pretty terrible, but maybe things get better with a larger sample? Here’s the data for 3000 Tourneys:
A 20% ROI player will be a loser over a 3,000 tourney sample almost 26% of the time. That’s much higher than I’d expected, and it’s the sort of number that should scare the shit out of prospective and current MTT professionals–If you want to play MTTs for a living, you better either put in a ton of volume, play really well, or be prepared to be a slave to variance (and nobody’s actually prepared for that).
Here’s lots of data for lots of situations (sorry for the ugly formatting):
| ROI | Tourneys Played | Expected Earn | Chance of Loss | Chance of Earning < .5x EV | Chance of Earning > 1.5x EV | Chance of Earning > 2x EV |
| 20% | 100 | $2,394.53 | 65% | 67% | 30% | 28% |
| 20% | 500 | $11,972.65 | 53% | 60% | 30% | 25% |
| 20% | 1000 | $23,945.30 | 42% | 50% | 36% | 31% |
| 20% | 2000 | $47,890.60 | 33% | 44% | 35% | 25% |
| 20% | 5000 | $119,726.50 | 20% | 38% | 30% | 17% |
| 40% | 100 | $4,789.06 | 61% | 65% | 27% | 23% |
| 40% | 500 | $23,945.30 | 37% | 51% | 31% | 26% |
| 40% | 1000 | $47,890.60 | 29% | 44% | 32% | 23% |
| 40% | 2000 | $95,781.20 | 14% | 33% | 28% | 17% |
| 40% | 5000 | $239,453.00 | 6% | 26% | 21% | 8% |
| 60% | 100 | $7,183.59 | 56% | 63% | 29% | 24% |
| 60% | 500 | $35,917.95 | 29% | 49% | 31% | 25% |
| 60% | 1000 | $71,835.90 | 20% | 41% | 27% | 18% |
| 60% | 2000 | $143,671.80 | 9% | 33% | 26% | 13% |
| 60% | 5000 | $359,179.50 | 1% | 16% | 17% | 4% |
| 80% | 100 | $9,578.12 | 51% | 62% | 25% | 21% |
| 80% | 500 | $47,890.60 | 24% | 46% | 28% | 22% |
| 80% | 1000 | $95,781.20 | 12% | 36% | 28% | 16% |
| 80% | 2000 | $191,562.40 | 5% | 27% | 23% | 9% |
| 80% | 5000 | $478,906.00 | 0% | 13% | 12% | 2% |
| 100% | 100 | $11,972.65 | 47% | 61% | 24% | 18% |
| 100% | 500 | $59,863.25 | 18% | 44% | 25% | 20% |
| 100% | 1000 | $119,726.50 | 9% | 35% | 25% | 11% |
| 100% | 2000 | $239,453.00 | 1% | 24% | 18% | 5% |
| 100% | 5000 | $598,632.50 | 0% | 8% | 10% | 1% |
There’s obviously a lot of information there, but some things jump out. In particular, life totally sucks if you’re a 20% ROI player. Even if you play 5k tourneys (which would be a decent sample for an entire year), you still have a 20% chance of losing money and a 38% chance of making less than ~60k. That totally sucks. Anyone except a true tourney god is more likely to lose over 100 tourneys than to win, which also sucks, and even a great tourney player has a decent chance of losing over 1k+ tournaments or to make only half her expected earn over 5k tournaments. Of course, the upside is good too, but the risk of losing money should be pretty scary to professional MTT players.
I should mention that this data lines up pretty well with my experience. I know a lot of professional MTT players. Losing months are incredibly common for them, and losing years happen fairly often. Years where they way underperform their expectations are typical. So, I hope people consider this before deciding to play (or continue playing) these for a living. People who are really good at MTTs, willing to put in tons of volume, and have huge bankrolls and strong stomachs might be better off playing large field MTTs professionally, but there aren’t many of those people. I think for the vast majority of people, it’s not a good idea (even for those who play very well).
You can find more data and some discussion about the distribution here and here. In future posts (probably coming soon, but I’m not making any promises), I’ll compare this data to cash games (both NLHE and PLO), STTs, and small field MTTs (i.e. 45s and 180s). I’ll also look into how stuff like this affects backing. So, if that stuff interests you, stay tuned or whatever. You can follow me on twitter if you want to know when my posts go up, or just subscribe to my RSS feed.
What is “ITM”?
An abbreviation of “In The Money”, ITM is a term used in tournament poker to quantify the rate at which a poker player will make the money/cash in a tournament.
Benefits of ITM
Keeping tabs on your ITM poker rate means you are exercising good record keeping and on top of your cash rate. It also means you can prudently forecast how many tournaments you will cash in next month based on the number you enter. It shows you are serious about your tournament poker, keen to monitor and track your performance.
Restrictions of ITM
Calculating your ITM is great, but it is not an indication of how profitable you are. After all, you might cash most of the time but never make it past the 1st or 2nd level after cashing. This would mean you have a poor hourly and poor ROI. Tracking your ROI is far more beneficial than looking at your ITM. I recommend using both methods if you are a serious tournament poker player looking to improve.
How Do I Calculate ITM?
Itm Poker Definition
Calculating your ITM is easy. Just use the formula below:
# Cashes/ # MTTS entered Multiplied by 100 = ITM Rate as %
E.G 10 cashes / 90 MTTs entered x 100 = 11% ITM Rate
What is a Good ITM Rate?
I think setting a target of 20-22% is challenging but realistic enough to shoot for. If you are consistently getting above this than you are doing very well. Most MTT experts accept 15 – 20% as a decent cash rate. If you are recording significantly less than this, than you need to look at the MTTS you play and the strategy you employ.
How Can I Improve my ITM rate?
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Caution
Having a good ITM poker rate is awesome but it’s important to remember that the goal when playing tournaments is to make as much money as possible. If you are adopting a nitty style that eeks you into the money a lot of the time but rarely a deep run or final table, then you need to rethink your strategy. Tournaments will always reward those who finish in the highest places. To achieve this, you have to take calculated risks, steal the blinds and build a decent stack. You need to be the player taking advantage of those that are trying to survive the next level of pay and not the one that is scared to bubble or not cash. We’re here to make money not double our buy in.
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