Tournament Strategy: Pay Out Structure

If you are good enough and lucky enough to make it into the money, you will notice a dramatic shift in the play of your opponents. It's like somebody flipped a switch. Suddenly players who wouldn't call a raise without the absolute nuts are going all in with king queen off suit. What the heck is going on?


Most people make it a goal to get into the money, so they play really tight as that goal gets closer. You knew this and you exploited their overly conservative play (see Tournament Strategy: Getting Near the Money ) and it is hoped you built a nice stack grabbing all those pots everyone else was too afraid to contest. Now that everyone else has achieved their goal and made it into the money, they immediately start playing much, much more aggressively. Their thinking is that they have gotten their buy-in back, so everything above that is gravy. Guys who have been tight suddenly start playing very loose.



In my last post, we examined the blind structure of tournaments. From the same on-line tournament we looked at then, let's look at the pay out structure. This tournament had 348 entrants, each of whom paid $2.25 to play. The pay out structure was:

Place Prize
1. $174
2. $111.36
3. $83.52
4. $64.38
5. $48.72
6. $34.80
7. $22.62
8. $17.20
9. $13.92
10-12. $8.70
13-15. $6.96
16-18. $5.22
19-27. $3.83
28-36. $3.13

To make it into the money players had to finish in the top 11%. In addition to the entry fee participants also have to invest their time. In our example tournament over two hours had elapsed before the field was down to 36 players. So why are so many players content to make it their goal to just finish in the money? In our example, when you subtract the entry fee the fellow who finished in 28th place out of a field of 348 players made a profit of 88 cents.

It should never be your goal to just make it into the money. You need to set your sites much higher to make playing in tournaments profitable. That is why you should immediately tighten up when every one else starts gambling. Once you make it into the money, the goal is to move up positions. When much of the field is gambling, you can sit back and let the smaller stacks knock each other out. When you get a good hand, you are much more likely to get paid off by someone playing looser than you.