Hey, 

These last few days I discovered an amazing tool that i never seen, it is a variance calculator, which can be used for tournaments or cash games.

Here is the link: http://pokerdope.com/tournament-variance-calculator/

I started to play with this tool, and get some shocking numbers that i never realize in the past, specially the impact of this numbers when we decide to gamble live poker tournaments. And this generated in me some doubts about the EV of make this kind of tournaments investments.

Supposed that a group of players would have an amazing 100% ROI on an EPT, WPT, or any poker tournament with a buy in of around 5k. And at the start of the year each of them decided take a piece of there bankroll that will be 53k to play 10 tournaments of 5.3k this year, that will be there investment playing 5k tournaments.

This are the results that i get about how is going to be distributed the money at the end of the year between these differents players with exactly the same ROI, same field, same structure and everything, the will show results complete differents, and they are all more influenced by variance than skill, take a look to the graph:

-50% of the player will loose money

-45% will get between some marginal winnings and some winnings

-5% Just this players get the money that we are going for.

Here is my question: 

-If i can predict with math that even beeing the best poker tournament in the world your chances of loose money are closte to 50% at the end of the year with this investment. 

Would be a good investment whit those 53k ? 

I talked with a friend of mine that is poker player too, and he told me that he understand live tournaments like a way to have fun, while he mantains his positive expectations (EV+). 

And this statement is somewhat shocking to me. Why ? As we can see if we not add volume to our investments, decisions that were EV+ in a theoretical world, becomes awful investments (EV-) in our time-space. If the golden price is in the long run, and long run in this case doesnt exist, would be my investment EV+ in the universe that i live ? I understand that those 53k are an EV+ investment in a theoretical and strictly mathematical world. But in our world we don´t even know if we still going to be alive in next 10 years, or next week.

You can not take these quantities and hope this year be one of the tweenty next years where you will get paid for your investment.