PTOTW Rankings

[frob23]

So I was bored this afternoon and decided to do something fun. I decided to use the PokerStars TLB point calculations and then go and rank everyone who has played in the PTOTW tournaments since they have moved to Full Tilt. We have had 5 tournaments there and I actually have all the results for every finish, so it was easy to calculate.

I didn't include the bounties for the two tournaments where we had bounty players but I did take into account that #57 was worth $500 and the rest were only worth $100. On top of that, there were 15 players in #57 so doing well in that one was worth a lot of points.

The formula from PokerStars for the calculation is:

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

PokerStars uses $0 for the buy-in when it's a freeroll. I did not do this. For the numbers below the "buy-in" was calculated by using the (total prize pool) / (number of players). So #57 had a buy-in of $33.33 while #61 only had a buy-in of $12.50. The others were all $14.29.

This isn't a perfect system but it's good enough. It also rewards playing every week even if you don't cash. I think that is fair enough since those who play more often are contributing more here and a little bump even when they are on the bottom is reasonable.

So, of the 23 different people who have played in the last 5 PTOTW tournaments, here are the top 5 places:

1st: frecklers (168.1 points)
2nd: frob2600 (167.7 points)
3rd: LiLadyPokerPro (159.3 points)
4th: gamer4life27 (126.0 points)
5th: Dew12109 (123.9 points)

We're all bunched real close together at the top. The points range from 21.6 to 168.1 right now. And I am being beaten by a hair. And everyone is one money finish away from taking 1st.

PS: I was semi-inspired to punch in these numbers because Dew was talking about being frustrated by always getting 3rd. Even though he's getting third, he's doing really well. The top group is bunched together pretty tightly and then it falls off rather steeply.

Mean: 68.6 points
Median: 43.8 points

As you can see from the mean and median, the data here isn't balanced. The top bunch of people who play frequently and do well a fair amount of the time have the majority of the points. Actually 54% of the points are held by those in the top 6 spots.


Enough... I seriously need a life. Thankfully, I have a woman who is flying in tonight to visit me. And she'll keep me away from poker. I know it.

[tony]

Hey frob23 good post, I moved it from Community Awards here to the Tournaments forum.

[liladypokerpro]

That's pretty awesome Frob! You should get bored more often LOL Your boredom always results in something cool and/or interesting.

[frob23]

I am pretty "busy" this week. So I might not be online very often. But I will get on from time to time and check out stuff.

If you played in one of the last 5 games and would like to know your ranking and points so far, just fire off a PM to me and I'll let you know. I decided to only list the top 5 because there are several people who have only played 1 or 2 games and might not have had a great game and are near the bottom of the list. And I am sure that some of those people are actually really good players but they just didn't do well with how the points were calculated. I didn't want anyone to be embarrassed or upset to have it publicly stated that they were 22nd out of 23 people -- especially with how arbitrary the numbers probably are.

Also, now that I have this set up, it should be fairly easy to add new numbers as each PTOTW happens. Just as long as I have the complete list of who played in it and what spot they finished in. I'll probably work on improving the point system to make more sense and be more fair, if I decide to keep doing this.

[C8H10N4O2]

This made me laugh. I'm glad you got bored and decided to calculate that.

[DeadBabySoup]

lol... that's cool. but there was a much easier way of calculating this. total dollars won

[frob23]

lol... that's cool. but there was a much easier way of calculating this. total dollars won

Total dollars won is more ambiguous. A few of us are tied. On top of that, someone who finishes 4th twice is probably at least marginally better than someone who finishes last twice. If we go for money wins, then maollila would have first just for that one win. And frecklers would be tied at 4th even though he took 1st in two of the 5 games.

I think the points thing is more interesting. But I could do it by money won as well.

[frecklers]

Total dollars won is more ambiguous. A few of us are tied. On top of that, someone who finishes 4th twice is probably at least marginally better than someone who finishes last twice. If we go for money wins, then maollila would have first just for that one win. And frecklers would be tied at 4th even though he took 1st in two of the 5 games.

I think the points thing is more interesting. But I could do it by money won as well.

In that case I prefer the way you have done it frob

[DeadBabySoup]

the sample size is too small to say one player has played better than another. i've only played 2 and was 2 outed in one, going out first or second. i don't feel like i played any worse than the one i took second. also, someone sitting out could take 4th every time. but they obviously wouldn't have played better than those who got knocked out ahead of them. so i think either way, it's just giving you a rough idea that will become more clear as more games are played. that said, the poker stars method looks cooler with the decimal points and everything

[frob23]

You're actually doing pretty well in both systems. Like you say, there aren't a lot of games right now, but if I keep these running we should have a better and better sample to use.

I admit that a player sitting out will do artificially well in these rankings. But, I don't really think that is a horrible thing either. They are doing just as well as if they played each game but folded everything but AA or KK -- and happened to never get either of those hands. It's not a winning strategy but someone could play that way. If they lasted longer, that is fine.

In the long run though, the players who go broke early sometimes but place higher at others... will have more points.

As an example, let's say you go out 8/8 for 6 tournaments and placed 1st, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd in the other 4. While a player that sits out gets 4th in all of those.

You would have 322.3 points for those 10 games.
They would have 298.0 points for the same 10 games.

You're finishing dead last 60% of the time while they're in the top 50% every time. But because you're able to get deep once in a while, you get more points. Obviously, if you're doing better than last even when you're outside the money, you'll have even more points. And a player sitting out won't always do as well as 4th.

[gamer4life27]

I love this new system frob. I would like to see two things added to this though. The first would be how many games they attended out of how many times they cashed. Maybe what place they finished in each tournament in a seperate section, but that might be too much work, but it would be cool to see.

And the second would be to see this after about 50 tournaments. I know thats a little under a year, but I figure that would give enough of an sample size so that skill would prevail over luck and we could see who really is top dog in the PTOTW and we could maybe do a sort of tier thing here where top dogs would face staff here at rakeback heads up for prizes (money, gifts, etc.). That would be a REALLY cool thing to do.

[frob23]

I can probably implement an ITM and game count thing very easily. Actually, that is a really minor change. I just added an extra sheet and put the cash amounts in. And then it's a very simple thing to run those numbers. I think an ITM% is just as useful as a specific count and I'll provide the number of games so someone can easily figure out how many cashes it is.

The other one is much more complicated. The places each person finished and the exact number of times is relative to the size of the field. Finishing in 4th in a 7 person game and 4th in a 15th person game is a much different accomplishment. And accounting for all that is a much larger task than my simple spreadsheet can easily handle. On the plus side, I think the points system itself gives a good idea of how well a player does when it comes to placing in all tournaments.

If I find an easy way to do it, I am not opposed to implementing that. But right now, I can't think of a good or simple way to do it. Sorry. I have already set up the ITM% and count thing though. So we will have that.

[frob23]

I have been playing with this a little more. We have had several more tournaments and several people have played enough of them to actually try and implement some other things.

I decided to make a cutoff of 5 games. If someone has played less than that, they are excluded from the new calculations. If they have played more, I look at everything. So far, we only have 7 people who have played 5+ games.

I have tried doing the average number of points (per game) for each player. That one doesn't seem too bad. It does offer a bit more of a consequence for having a bunch of games where you get knocked out early.

I also tried taking the sum of the 5 highest scores. So, once you have more than 5 games, I only add up the highest 5 games. This means you no longer get points just for showing up but it also means that improving your score can be very hard. And it leaves open the possibility of having a bunch of people will the same score. But it is still interesting.

I have also done ITM calculations for those people who have over 5 games.

At the current moment, it doesn't really change much of anything. Some players move up or down a spot depending on which scale is used but there is nothing too dramatic. I am going to leave all of them in place and see how the numbers play out for the future.

I think I rather like the average number of points but my opinion of that is subject to change depending on if I feel it fairly represents the skill level or not. Both the "Top 5" method and the "Average" method reward going deep. The average method also gives a penalty for those times you do poorly though.

The one nice thing about this, though, is that it means someone who starts playing the games in 6 months isn't really hopelessly behind because the average and top 5 both reduce the amount of an advantage a player has from playing multiple games.

[RiverstarsVictim]

Flawed I'm sure. I only played in 2 and got runner-up twice. I guess not entering equals a big fat zero. I'll always suck at this game

[frob23]

Flawed I'm sure. I only played in 2 and got runner-up twice. I guess not entering equals a big fat zero. I'll always suck at this game

This is one reason we're not counting the average until you have at least 5 games. Because your ITM is 100% and your average is also higher than is sustainable over many games. It is like maollila who has played one game, took 1st in it, and has the highest average based on that.

Of course, 5 games is a small sample size... but we'll see if making the cut-off higher is feasible in the future. There are flaws to every system though.

[gamer4life27]

Why not do it so if you have only played on or two points, make it an average of your top 5? If someone only showed up once and got, for example, 100 points. If someone who came 7 times and got the following points: 12, 60, 40, 17, 18, 32, 18.

For the person who played once, that would be (100 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0)/5 = 20. Where as the person who showed up 7 times would have an average of (60 + 40 + 32 + 18 + 18)/5 = 33.6. This way, if you had a bad run a few tourneys then it wouldn't affect your top 5 average score.

But this also draws up some problems when you see a lot of games where the same few people always take top and have roughly the same score and the winner is only determined by how many people were in it. Still, I think that averaging a top so many scores would be beneficial to get ride of of the people who got invited one or twice and placed first. Where as there are some people who have come on a regular basis and placed continuously.

[frob23]

The average of the top 5 will give you identical rankings as the sum of the top 5. It would just be the sum divided by 5. It wouldn't change the order.

If it really mattered, I could include people will less than 5 games but I don't see the value. If I give them "0" for each game they haven't played... they will still be very low on the rankings. If I only count what they have, they'll enjoy an unfair boost if they do really well in only 1 or 2 games and don't play any others.

One reason I like the average method is that is does include those occasional bad games we all have. Even the best player will have a game or two where they don't do well at all or get unlucky. But someone who has many of these poor finishes is probably a worse player than someone who has few... even if the one with many poor finishes has 5 high finishes. For example, if Player A plays 10 games (assume 9 people for all games)... and has 5 first place finishes... and Player B plays 50 games and has 5 first place finishes... Player A is probably a better player but they would have equal rankings if we only count the top 5.

Right now, I am investigating both methods though. And we will see how it turns out in the long run.

[travz21]

I don't think there is a fair way to do it. If people want to be rated better against people who've played way more, they should get more involved in the forum to give them the best chance to play in as many PTOTW tourneys as possible. You should keep the rating system like it was. I don't think it's right to cater to people who haven't played in as many events. The rating system should reward good play as well as amount of play imo. Tbh, I don't really care about a rating system...just trying to help some fellow members out.

Also, maybe not assigning points to every player in the field would be better. Say, giving points to the top 40% of the field, or something of the like.

[allthatremains]

In our live tourney league we use a simple point system to rank players.

# of players plus 1 minus your position.

So if there was a field of 20 and you finished 3rd (20+1-3=18 points).

This system allows for more points available when the field is deeper, but the flaw is it rewards a little too much for consistency and not enough for finishing deep.

If you used this system for the PTOTW, I would only allow the top 50% of games in the rankings. Currently I believe there have been 10 games played, so only top 5 would be allowed. This would keep the rankings fairer to people who think they don't get selected enough.

Going forward, you could do something like Pokerstars TLB, where they award for weekly, monthly and yearly. They use top 10,20 and 100 finishes respectively. For the PTOTW in the future you could use: 1. top 5 of last 10
2. top 10 of last 20
3. top 50% since inception
This would also allow you to see whose recently hot, and allow newer members a chance to catch up.

Beside the score you could also show in brackets the amount of $ that was actually won from these games.

frob, I would be interested in seeing how this system would rank the PTOTW tourneys. I don't have the info/knowledge/patience/drive to do it. Could you put it together, post it and
give your thoughts?

[frob23]

I could show total money won in brackets but I am afraid that will encourage beggars or something else. I do have ITM % calculations which I might use instead of that.

What I don't like about the (players + 1 - position) formula is the following:
* 1st place out of 8: 8 pts
* 7th place out of 14: 8 pts

I think finishing first in a field of 8 is much better than finishing 7th in a field of 14.
* 1st place out of 8: 59.6 pts
* 7th place out of 14: 26.4 pts

I know the PokerStars points method isn't perfect but it does address that slightly better. We have had tournaments with as few as 7 people and tournaments with as many as 15 people. I admit that the PS method isn't easy to calculate in your head but you can do it with most calculators. I use the gnumeric spreadsheet to do it.

I don't have enough to pull more than the top 5 finishes. In fact, no one has played 10 games yet. There have been 10 total but no one person has been in all of them. I will consider doing multiple rankings based on time periods in the future, when I have more games to go on. I am not exactly sure of an easy way to do that with my spreadsheet but I am sure it can be done.