Poker Tournament Trends (12/1 – 12/7)
Hello All. For the past 4 weeks I have been tracking field sizes in 30 big tournaments spread out between the biggest 4 online sites, Poker Stars, Full Tilt Poker, Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet. This week is the beginning of a new model I will be using from here on out though so the numbers do not correlate to the past 3 weeks. Please keep this in mind when looking at this weeks numbers.
All the moving averages are now adjusted moving averages. By this I mean that the largest and smallest number in the samples have been taken out. This is all the case in the PFI and SPFI totals for all 30 tournaments as well. This will help take out the effect of promos in the numbers. The Week to Week figure has also been tweaked. The biggest change this week is out PFI figures now, which shows us the general trend of each tournament in relation to its 10 or 5 week moving averages. This figure is now calculated using a weighting system which counts more recent tournaments heavier then less recent ones. This should make this figure much more accurate. Now onto the numbers for this week.
Full Tilt seems to have bounced back from a bad two weeks and is up 4.16% on the week with Wednesday 65k bouncing back from its very low week last week with a 22% growth after the Thanksgiving low. The other interesting note from the week is that we have seen the bubble burst for the newly formed Cereus network in their 3 majors during the week. The 200k contracted sharply this week back to 889 players which leads me to believe last week's figure of over 1000 players may have been achieved using promotional entries to players through email. I will be interested to see if this tournament stays at its old levels. The weekend brought some a bad finish as almost every tournament on Sunday contracted from last week's numbers. Most of these figures on Sunday are within a few standard deviations of the mean so we will have to see how the next few weeks pan out for any meaningful trends to emerge.
Finally, as you can see in the chart we have 4 tournaments that we have classified as trending down over our samples. The Stars Early 100r, Stars $500, Stars $215r and the Cereus $1k. These seem like fairly reasonable tournaments that would contract first under hard economic conditions like the ones we are facing world wide at the moment. Will this downward trend mean that others will follow or is this simply a small dip in these relatively high buyin tournament? Only time will tell, for now the news is most definately not bad as our first sitewide PFI number under the new model has come in at +1.47% growth. For definitions of each stat in the chart please read below.
http://www.jurollo.net/pokertrends1207.jpg
Last - Field size from last data entry
Chg - Change between current week's field size and last week's field size as a number
Chg % - Change between current week's field size and last week's field size as a percentage
10AMov - 10 Week adjusted moving average; adjusts to the current average for last 12 occassions of selected tournament minus the high and low value of the set
Chg % - Change between the current week's data and the 10 week moving average as a percentage
5AMov - 5 Week adjusted moving average; adjusts to the current average for last 7 occassions of selected tournament minus the high and low value of the set
Chg % - Change between the current week's data and the 5 week moving average as a percentage
10/5 Chg - Change between the 5 week moving average and the 10 week moving average as a percentage
F5/L5 Chg - Change between the last 5 occassions of a selected tournament and the 6th through 10th occurrences as a percentage
PFI® - Poker Field Index® value measures weighted growth from the past 10 weeks of data, the higher the figure the steeper the growth, more recent tournaments are weighted more heavily
STPFI® - Short Term Poker Field Index® value measures weighted growth from the past 5 weeks of data, the higher the figure the steeper the growth, more recent tournaments are weighted more heavily, more effected by short term jumps due to promotions