My Results

I thought it would be virtually impossible to reach a prize-worthy position in any of the new PokerStars Battle of the Planets sit-and-go leaderboards playing only single table tournaments, but obviously I just forgot how great I am.

Seriously though, look at this unbelievable run of results I needed to even get up to 8th place: 7 x 1st, 5 x 2nd and 3 x 3rd.

That's 15 in-the-money finishes out of 20 tournaments.  Call it a game of skill if you like, but that kind of form takes more than a little luck.

You can see from my profit graph that I've never had a streak quite like it before.  Isn't it pretty?

I know there's bound to be an almighty downswing waiting around the corner, but I can brag while it's going well can't I?

Each Battle of the Planets league ends on Saturday night and resets on Sunday morning so there's still two full days of play left and my position certainly isn't safe.  504 points was enough for both 7th and 8th place last week, but right now 8th place is the best I can possibly get with that score.

If I manage to stay in to the top ten, I'll win some cash (it's $80 for 8th) and a ticket to the monthly $50,000 freeroll.  It's a triple shootout format (729 players max) but with eight different leagues, two "orbits" in each and ten players winning a ticket each week, in a four-week month that's 640 tickets given away for the tournament.  Some players will win two tickets and some winners won't turn up so the value of the freeroll ticket must be at least $100.

If I don't hang on to the giddy heights of top ten stardom, there's still some prize money for finishing in the top 30.  I should have a pretty good shot at that at least.

I realised - completely by accident when I happened to load the right number of tournament summaries into Poker Tracker at the right time - that I'd recently reached $10,000 spent on these turbo SNG entries.  I only mention it because that same money (if I actually had it all in the same place at the same time) would get me one World Series of Poker Main Event entry.

Doing things this way involves a little less variance, though.  Sure, I'm not going to win ten million but I'm also not going to lose ten grand all to one suckout.  It'd take 625 different suckouts.

Here's the magic stats:

I still can't believe that this is close to being a reliable sample size.  My last eight results alone (1st, 1st, 2nd, 4th, 3rd, 3rd, 3rd, 1st) pushed the overall ROI up from the 16.6% shown here to 18.4%.  Maybe when I've played a few thousand I'll have a little more confidence in the numbers.

EDIT: 5 hours to go and I'm 10th.  Gonna be close.

EDIT: Sodding eleventh.  A big fuck you to "$tr8t Hu$tla" who not only has a shit screen name, he also waited until the very last minute to score 521 points.  I hope I get the chance to bust you soon!

A week ago, Poker Stars launched their "Battle of the Planets" leaderboard week for sit-and-go tournaments. You get points whenever you finish in the money, then your best blocks of 20 results (the "low orbit") or 100 results (the "high orbit") determine your league position.

As I happened to be playing quite a few SNGs at the moment anyway, it's looked to be a nice free shot at some extra money.

My first set of results is now in: not even close.

The likely difficulty for single table sit-and-go players like myself is that although the leagues are divided by entry fee you also have to compete against players in the 18-man and 27-man tournaments, and they receive nearly twice as many points for a first place finish as you do for winning a 9-man SNG.

Of course, whatever you play it would take a pretty insane run of luck to win one of these things, but five or six first places in 3-table tournaments from a block of 20 seems much more achievable than ten or eleven single table victories in the same period - that would be first place at least every other game - to get the same number of points.

ryan422323, this week's winner in the "Earth - low orbit" (blocks of 20 for $10-$19 tournaments - the level I'm playing at), looks like a losing player who suddenly got lucky at the right time. It happens.

As expected, Sharkscope reveals his most recent results are from a mixture of 18-, 27- and 45-man sit and go tournaments (although the 45-man results don't count for this leaderboard - that's apparently enough players to be considered a real tournament).

Second place finisher jellycz has had a rather better tournament career, with Sharkscope showing a long term return on investment of 19% across his PokerStars tournaments.

Still, he would have had to do much better than that over the block of 20 that counted towards his leaderboard position.

In fact we can work out just what kind of return is needed to win the Battle of the Planets from the final points totals.

Regardless of the buy-in, the points you receive are based on the prize distribution rather than the actual dollar amounts won. The number of points is the same as the prize money would be for a $10 buy-in. For example, first place in a 9-man SNG gets 45 points - although you actually win $67.50 for a $15+1 stake or $112.50 for a $25+2, the prize is always 4.5x your stake. First place in a 27-man SNG wins 8x the stake, so you receive 80 points.

So, with 637 points the winner would have received $637 in real money if he had played 20 sit-and-go tournaments that cost $10 each. That's an amazing 219% ROI! Second place with 552 points is still-insane 176% ROI.

My hottest block landed me 369 points, with 11 in-the-money finishes out of 20 (5 x 1st, 4 x 2nd, 2 x 3rd). That's a fiendishly good 85% ROI, and I finished 256th.