As everyone races towards qualifying for our Final Tournament next month, we started wondering how important those extra points really are. As you may or may not know, the starting chipstacks at our Final Tournament are based on your points. Therefore, the more points you have, the bigger your starting stack.
But how important is that starting stack? We crunched some numbers for ya…
Here we have the Final Tournament, the Winner of the tournament, and his or her starting position relative to the other 40 players.
Interesting to note, we’ve yet to have a player start at the top and also win the Final Tournament!
We weren’t able to include any data before the 2011 Spring tournament, since we hadn’t implemented our current points tracking yet. So, we don’t have the starting positions for Martina, Jeff’s first win, Wally Lang, or Dave Matysiak – or any of the other winners from 2005 onward!
Anyway, let’s break this down into something visual.
When we look at the winners broken down into 10-place increments of their starting position, we get a real good idea of how important those starting chipstacks really are. 57% of our Final Tournament winners came from players with a top-10 starting position! Another third-ish is made up of those in the top 20.
But let’s look a little deeper…
The top 10 becomes less important when we break down the positions in 5-place increments. 50% of our winners not only came from the top 10, but from the top 5!
Starting in the top 5 also has another benefit – being chipleader at your starting table. Everyone else starts below you, so even an unlucky all-in on the first hand will prevent you from going home immediately.
So there you have it – points really matter! Unless, of course, you’re the outlier like Jody Ray in his second victory.
Keep fighting for those points, and we’ll see if the trend continues or is broken on November 9th at RiRa Irish Pub!