Prose from a Poshboy

[Dubai]

Go on then u got me, if I play I will buy shares in myself with you Aaron @1.35- whatever amount you are comfortable with is fine

[aaron1867]

Not sure what your point is...!

[Dubai]

You seemed to suggest no one should charge above 1.3- so I'm offering to buy additional action in myself at 1.35

[Doobs]

Been a pretty interesting situation for me with this staking thread I put up yesterday. I've just posted this in there:

Hi guys,

I've always tried to find a balance when pricing up stakes between maximising my own income as a professional (get the best price I can sell out for) and giving the community an appealing and profitable investment.

I've always priced things according to my beliefs about the value of the investment and often taken advice from those better placed to judge. I've probably had 20 or 30 threads on here, all of which have sold out, and 95% have sold out within the first hour.

To me this thread is no different to any of the others, well not "no" different, but certainly it surprised me that a 5-10% price difference has made the difference between selling out in 20 minutes, and barely selling at all.

Anyway, the fact is it hasn't sold, so that can only be my fault for pricing it wrong (although I don't think titaniumbeans comment basically saying it was a joke helped at all  - in fact almost certainly put a lot of people off, because they don't want to buy something that somebody else considers a joke).

I respect market economics and when something doesn't sell that needs to be sold, I have no problem reducing the price. What I think it's worth is largely irrelevant - after all, is worth only what someone else will pay for it.

So I'll close this one and start a new thread selling at 1.35 and 1.3 and we'll see what happens. Lion Rampant and Keys will of course have their pieces reserved and pay the new price.

Thanks guys.

It was a horrible feeling actually the last 24 hours of feeling like I had got this one majorly wrong and to feel like I was taking the piss, and to not sell out in an hour, like I have done for over 20 threads over the last 2 years probably, wasn't nice.

I feel like it's good for me to have been taken down a peg or two and I've been forced to swallow my pride and drop the price which was pretty hard for me to do. But it's important not to have an ego about these sort of things I think so I think I've done the right thing. Although I didn't like it, it's probably a good thing that this has happened.

I can't quite get my head around the reasons why it hasn't sold - I guess people don't really believe me about how good value the Monte Carlo is going to be, with tons of satellites and possible overlay not to mention "home advantage" which I believe to be hugely important, I think it'll be one of the best value tournaments of the year. And I guess not many people have played much poker in Spain... Anyway, with the price as it is now, it's definitely one of the best value packages I've ever sold, so if it doesn't sell out, I'll be completely bemused...

***

Spent Sunday and Monday with my family in Cambridge, was lovely - we even Skyped Bobby on easter sunday who is on tour in the USA with Out of the blue having a mad time. They've just had 11 days in Hong Kong performing to thousands every night, everyone going mad for him and his friends, and having some incredible experiences there. He's totally burnt out now and still got 2 more weeks to go...

My other brother Mark is very down, after 7/8 stages of interviews, assessment days, getting through 3000 people for 15 places, he's basically pure bubbled his dream job the other day. He's graduating this summer and needs a job pronto. He's back to square one now but will get there, he's never been one to be down in the dumps about anything, he'll pick himself back up.

I'm back in nottingham now, back to the grind tomorrow probably.

Assuming I have bought some in the second package, and didn't in the first, I'll give an explanation.

I think the tournament selection is clearly very good.  I wouldn't want to be paying these kind of premiums for a WSOP $3k event or an EPT.

I can categorically state that titanium bean's post made no difference.  I am all for sticking two fingers up at people who are a bit out of order, but I think he made a fair point with a bit of humour.  It grates a bit that you seem to be blaming him in part.

If I buy in the Monte Carlo at 1.5, unles I think you are really 1.7 or above I am probably buying at -EV after variance.  I can see the comp is likely to be a bit soft for a £1k, but it just seemed to be pushing it.  Every staking request seems to be some soft tournament are other, and I arrive at the very same tournament and find myself sitting next to Mickey P, or I have Marc Wright or Martins Adeniya two to my left (again), or Vanessa Selbst and Chris Moorman are making up the numbers.  

Sure you sometimes get joke soft tables, but once you get a handful of other strong players at your table and it becomes much harder to see how they can all be 1.7.   As I said above, I think you have really tournament selected well here, but you could easily find yourself sat at the same table as a couple of the stronger UK players.

If I didn't genuinely believe you had a decent game and some solid live tekkers, I'd probably have given a miss.  I wouldn't be paying that mark up to somebody whose claim to fame is they can beat $.5/$1 6 max online, or shows a 20% ROI online with an average buyin of 30 bucks for instance.  

All this remove the best 5 and worst 5 results is clearly nonsense.  If they took my best 5 off, I'd look like no better than someone who was a complete fish live. I don't have a whole host of live tournament cashes simply because I don't play that many.  It doesn't mean for a second I believe that your average honey importer or garish hoodie wearer has a big edge on me.

Glad to see you more positive too, probably wouldn't have bought in a couple of weeks ago either.

Anyway hope that was balanced enough, good luck sir, take it down.

[nirvana]

I'd be fascinated to see your ROI for all £500+ tourns you've played lifetime. Then I'd like to see it with best 5 and worst 5 removed.

Why? This would only skew things the wrong way imo.

In a pretty small sample of tournaments that Alex has played lifetime (which live player has played a decent sample?!) so taking out 5 best scores would just make him or any other player look bad.

This is kind of the point tho, should I think Rasta is good value at 1.5/1.6 ?

Possibly you're missing the point here, which would be a surprise as you'd be among my picks for top 3 shrewdest forumites, but Greekstein is right. He's (probably accidentally) used the key word 'skew', in that mtt results are not normally distributed. I get your general point, but maybe taking away something like 10 downside for every 1 upside outlier would yield more accurate results.

As someone with a relatively unbiased sample of hundreds of live mtts (through the stable), I'd estimate live mtt ROIs for good players in fields of 2-500 in the £300-£1650 bracket are around 75%.

Yup, my outlier removal suggestion is pretty ridic for a long term staking consideration. But if you stake occasionally (which these kind of requests are aimed at ?) then it probably gives a more realistic prediction of the value of the individual tournament stake - ie, just burn it

[skolsuper]

I'd be fascinated to see your ROI for all £500+ tourns you've played lifetime. Then I'd like to see it with best 5 and worst 5 removed.

Why? This would only skew things the wrong way imo.

In a pretty small sample of tournaments that Alex has played lifetime (which live player has played a decent sample?!) so taking out 5 best scores would just make him or any other player look bad.

This is kind of the point tho, should I think Rasta is good value at 1.5/1.6 ?

Possibly you're missing the point here, which would be a surprise as you'd be among my picks for top 3 shrewdest forumites, but Greekstein is right. He's (probably accidentally) used the key word 'skew', in that mtt results are not normally distributed. I get your general point, but maybe taking away something like 10 downside for every 1 upside outlier would yield more accurate results.

As someone with a relatively unbiased sample of hundreds of live mtts (through the stable), I'd estimate live mtt ROIs for good players in fields of 2-500 in the £300-£1650 bracket are around 75%.

Yup, my outlier removal suggestion is pretty ridic for a long term staking consideration. But if you stake occasionally (which these kind of requests are aimed at ?) then it probably gives a more realistic prediction of the value of the individual tournament stake - ie, just burn it

Not at all it doesn't. If usually losing is a big problem, then yes by all means write off all tournament piece-buying as folly, but that doesn't make "you'll lose" a more realistic prediction than "expect something like 0-30% return with lots and lots of variance".

[nirvana]

The problem is, shrewd as I am :-), I can never resist using extremes to make a notional point. Your reason and accuracy are more compelling though !

Much more to learn from the original thread about customer perception, customer experience and how to market a talent than about probability and statistical analysis.

Sleep well Keys

[SuuPRlim]

Thanks for taking the trouble to reply.  I still don't really get it but I appreciate the effort.  Perhaps I'm just greedy and would keep it all for myself...

Not a problem.

You're thinking "well I'm a profitable player here, and I hve £1,000 to hand, so why would I sell when I could keep all the profit I'm inevitably going to make to myself"

As a point, it is quite redundant, however it's actually quite hard to explain why (lol) because the logic is completely correct, I guess the best way to explain it is this...

Lets set Alex's ROI at 75% (Keys rough estimates are good enough for me) this means in theory that if alex enters this tournament for £1,000 he "makes" £750 profit. If he played £1,000 monte carlo's he'd have to invest £1,000,000 and he total cashes we'd expect to be around £1,750,000 (£750k profit, or 75% roi) HOWEVER we're not ever going to play 1000 of these, in fact he's very unlikely to play 50 in his entire life, and he profit's wont come in the form of £750 every time he plays, most of the time he'll lose £1k (which will be unlucky) and when he wins, it'll be for a gd deal more than £750 profit most likely (this will be lucky)

Now, and again we don't know thee reasons why, but Alex will need to protect his bankroll, and he might feel that £1,000 of exposure is too high for him, and losing would affect the utility of his poker play (i.e the short term luck of this one tournament could affect his ability to put himself in MORE profitable spots in the near future) but that £600 is a comfortable amount to expose himself to. He gives up 40% of his £750 theoretical profit (£300) to his backers, and for this £300 they pay a premium to him (this effectively goes straight into his pocket and they assume the same amount of variance he does.

What he has done is sacrificed some of the profit in one spot, in a bid to limit his exposure - for reasons that are private to him.

[cambridgealex]

My other brother Mark is very down, after 7/8 stages of interviews, assessment days, getting through 3000 people for 15 places, he's basically pure bubbled his dream job the other day. He's graduating this summer and needs a job pronto. He's back to square one now but will get there, he's never been one to be down in the dumps about anything, he'll pick himself back up.

Not many people land their dream job straight out of uni!  What sort of job is he looking for?

OK not dream job, but a graduate scheme for the market leader of the field he is interested in / has work experience. It was with "Marsh" - insurance broker and risk adviser. My Dad works for Willis who do the same thing, just have slightly smaller market share than Marsh.

@0800 - glad Dave has answered your questions. Basically like pleno said, winning £20k doesn't mean I'm going to punt £5k of it on 4 bullets on 2 tournaments where the outcome is going to be 4 bricks about 50% of the time. I would likely go bankrupt very quickly if I didn't sell percentages for tournaments that were for x% of my bankroll.

@nirvana, my lifetime ROI for live tournaments is about 170% or something, suggesting I could sell at 2.7 to be breakeven...this means very little because of sample size of course, but it wouldn't be any use in proving that 1.5 was bad value...I know this isn't what you were saying exactly. Keys' 75% figure sounds more realistic. I would be pretty confident that my ROI in the Monte Carlo should I play 100,000 of them would be over 60. We'll never know, and I can never prove it but that's just what I think.

@adam, you made the point that I could've/should've stood my ground and left it as it was. My initial thought was to do so, but it really makes no sense. It's not worth me not selling about £2ks worth of action just to save a bit of pride or "make a point". You have to respect market economics, it's worked in my favour up until now (people have always bought at similar markups in me in the past) and now the market has changed, and I didn't sell out - so I'll drop the price. I'd rather let my play do the talking and ship one of them I absolutely do not agree that me dropping the price is me saying "yeh you're right I'm not worth 1.5", I do, and again, I'll always crossbook myself vs anyone who wants to on that.

[cambridgealex]

1.5 was ridic, field is still going to be tough and not really sure anyone should be over .3 IMO.

Yeah you cashed the last two, but how long was that ago & the sats in place? I think it's about 35% of field will sats, still will be one of best fields in recent times.

Lots of silly marks up though lately

Not rising to it, but will just point out how ridiculous the points that "it was a long time ago" and about satellites. I don't know how either of those can make this a TOUGHER tournament than in 2011?

Unless you think in 2 years I have improved at a slower rate than the "field" has?

And having MORE satellites than in 2011 makes it tougher?

About the field, I bet most if not all of the horses Keith and Keys put into the MC are in the top 30 out of the 500 runners they are hoping for.

[rfgqqabc]

@adam, you made the point that I could've/should've stood my ground and left it as it was. My initial thought was to do so, but it really makes no sense. It's not worth me not selling about £2ks worth of action just to save a bit of pride or "make a point". You have to respect market economics, it's worked in my favour up until now (people have always bought at similar markups in me in the past) and now the market has changed, and I didn't sell out - so I'll drop the price. I'd rather let my play do the talking and ship one of them I absolutely do not agree that me dropping the price is me saying "yeh you're right I'm not worth 1.5", I do, and again, I'll always crossbook myself vs anyone who wants to on that.

I agree and started to try and say that but it kinda got confused in my rambling style. Obviously theoretically it is best to stand for it but absolutely stupid in practice. Redarmi showed that someone saying 1.5 isn't value isn't the same as saying your roi is >50%. Fwiw I'm not really sure but it is obviously closer/harder to be sure of than packages I have bought action. Like i said i think you would have sold more if you had waited longer and there are a bunch of other factors surrounding whether you sell other than the perceived value.

[rfgqqabc]

@0800 - glad Dave has answered your questions. Basically like pleno said, winning £20k doesn't mean I'm going to punt £5k of it on 4 bullets on 2 tournaments where the outcome is going to be 4 bricks about 50% of the time. I would likely go bankrupt very quickly if I didn't sell percentages for tournaments that were for x% of my bankroll.
 

So, how much would you need to have before you would consider keeping the lot?  The only successful gamblers I know personally all have one thing in common; press up the stakes when you're in form and reduce them when you're not... mind you, that's horses and sports, but I would imagine it applies across the board as form is form.

I don't know the details of Al's finances but I imagine he would be selling more if he hadn't had a big month in March. So he probably has pressed a touch. Realistically you'd have to be confident of never going bust presuming you played the tournament regularly, which isn't strictly true, for example, someone might shot-take the main event and have 50% of themselves when in reality they are rolled for 1/2 of this. This is because it is a once a year opportunity to seek vast riches in a pond full of fish. Form is form, but the variance in tournament poker is massive. When edges get small, due to high stakes/schedules or something else,  people have been known to have downswings that consist of hundreds of buyins.

[NEWY]

Just a few observations/thoughts. Not sure how valid they are but here goes. Was the reason for staking more of a proffessional decision ie help with BRM and charge the higher mark up for providing a service as a player with a decent edge or was it to give blondes chance of a sweat in the spirit of our community or was it somewhere in the middle a bit of both?

If it was mostly for BRM and help with variance would you not be better off sattelliting in through the amazing value comps which as u say sttellite players are soft so you should easily qualify with 100 seats up for grabs then you keep all your action in a soft comp and will be better off than selling 25-30% and stumpin up the rest. Is the percentage your selling really going to make significant difference to your proffessional survival. 30% of £1k comp does not even constitute 1 decent cash pot from which you primarily make your living.

Therefore I would imagine a part of ur decision would be so as to get the community involved and the thrill of a sweat with friends investors and people railing for the love of the game etc was contributing factor. If this is the case I imagine the majority of people on this forum invest for the love of the game and to support fellow blondes as well as the chance of binking somethin, but mainly because they are getting involved in community spirit and want bit of fun etc. For these reasons prob dont want or need to pay high mark ups. if they purely wanted profitable investments they would not support all the requests put in staking thread.  for these reasons I think people may not be as forth coming with a higher mark up when it is seen as they are paying for a pro's living. they generally just want a sweat with as gud a value as poss.

Think original staking request was prob bit cheeky but if you dont ask u dont get. FWIW I think you handled it very dignified and sensible realising early on changed it to a more agreeable price where people can get their fix at a gud price and u get the backing u want. Not exactly sure what my point was, just fancied a ramble and intrigued as to what ur true motivation for staking was.  Gud luck hope all turns out well.

[NEWY]

Think I meant to say something along the lines of totally understand why u wud want 50 % backing for an EPT or vegas package etc but 30% of monte carlo in Notts seems like u want staking for diff reasons. ie for the fun and sweat with blondes. this obv should be reflected in a fun "love the game" price imo if this was the case.

[NEWY]

PPS lol at Aaron as always