Hijacking the Pokerstars Tournament Leader Board

Bear with me through a little background here, because the point of this post is VERY interesting (I think). Pokerstars has a weekly, monthly, and yearly tournament leader board (TLB) where the names of the players who have consistently done well in multitable tournaments are proudly displayed. While the monthly and yearly contests inexplicably have no prizes, the weekly winner gets a chance to play one of the "Team Pokerstars" celebrities (usually one of the 4 former world champions that endorse Pokerstars) heads up for a minimum of $1,000. If the celebrity wins the money carries over to the next week where another $1,000 is added. This continues until the TLB player wins and takes the cash.

So how do results in tournaments turn into the points with which the players are ranked on the TLB? It's really quite simple. Actually it's not. They use this ridiculous formula which spits out a point value for any result in the top 15% of finishers (I'll explain more below so don't bother trying to figure out what's going on with the formula).

Points = 10 * [sqrt(n)/sqrt(k)] * [1+log(b+0.25)]

Where:

n is the number of entrants
k is the place of finish (k=1 for the first-place finisher, and so on)
b is the buy-in amount in dollars (excluding administrative fee). For freerolls the buy-in is $0, and for FPP tournaments 1 FPP is counted as $0.05.

Basically what's going on is they use the tournament buy-in, the number of entrants and your finishing place to determine how many points you get. Bigger buy in or more entrants means more points.

You might think that since the best players play for the most money, buy in should be weighted most heavily. After all if you really want to know who the best players are, the best way to figure that out is to look at who has the best results at the highest levels. But it turns out that the effect of all those square roots and and logs is to make buy in much less significant than you might think. If it was linear you'd get 10 times as many points for winning a 100 player $200 buy in tournament than you would winning a 100 player $20 tournament. In fact you get 330 points for the former and 230 points for the latter. Clearly buy in is barely a factor at all.


The number of entrants makes a big impact, but it's also similarly deflated by the math. You get 230 for that 100 player $20 tournament, but you'd only get 729 for a $20 tournament with 1,000 players.

The place you finish is the last factor variable that determines how many points you get and while there's a drop off from 1st on down it's also not as big as you might guess. In our same $20 100 player tournament you'd get 230 for 1st, 163 for 2nd, 73 for 10th and 59 for 15th (out of the top 15% is zero).

If you put it all together you can see that the most important thing is to have a shit load of finishes in the top 15%.

So what does all this mean and what's the point? Well the point is if I play a slew of those $12 180 player turbo tournaments that I kicked ass in last Sunday I should be able to win the tournament leader board almost every week!

Pokerstars offers a little calculator that you can use to determine how many points you'd get for a given result in a given tournament and I looked at how many points every place in the top 15% (or the top 27 spots) generates. If I were to play 180 tournaments in a week and finish in places 1-27 exactly one time each I'd accumulate 2484 points. I'm certain I could do this much.

The tournaments take about an hour and 45 minutes to play to conclusion, but of course that's only if you take them all the way to the end. Conservatively, I would say on average each one might take me 45 minutes. So playing 6 at a time I could play 72 in an 8 hour day. But there's a little delay getting into 6 tournaments and a little down time at the end while you're waiting for your final tournaments to end and while they seem to be starting every 10 minutes there aren't as many as I want just waiting to be played so we'll call it 60 a day.

So if I play 60 a day, 6 days a week we've got 360 tournaments. If I was dead on average in terms of skill level (which we sure as hell know I'm not) and I had an average run of luck I'd generate 4968 points. The winner of the weekly TLB last week only had 3,293 points! In fact the person who had the most points in the entire month of August only had 6,980 points.

I suspect that since I'll usually be the absolute best and certainly always in the top 5 of the 180 players playing I can do quite a bit better than the average number of points I used for my calculations above.

So what now? Well this week the TLB leader from last week is playing the heads up match for $3,000. If he loses it means that next week, this weeks TLB winner will be playing for $4,000. Right now the weeks leader has 2,600 points, but what happens every week is the top players in the Sunday Million ($215 buy in, 7,000 players is a lot of points) jump to the top of the leader board and don't go much further. I've got about 1,000 points just from screwing around on Sunday and I've got 4 days left in the week, so I might go for it this week.

If everything I've calculated is correct I should be able to win almost every week until they stop running the $12 180 player tournaments or change the system. If either is the case I'll no doubt gain some degree of fame from the whole thing. At the very least I'm going to go balls to the wall tomorrow and see how many I can play and what my results are. I won another $500 today so I'm feeling pretty good about my play.