One thing that I see on poker forums a lot is people asking what a good average tournament cash percentage is – i.e. do good players cash 50% of the time or more? And while it’s always nice to cash in a poker tournament, the reality is that your average tournament cash percentage doesn’t really mean a whole lot in the long run. Furthermore, you need to be focusing on your return on investment (ROI) instead.
To illustrate why this is the case, let’s say that you play in ten different $5.50 10-man SNG’s, and you take third place ($10) in five of them, which works out to $50 in total winnings. The good thing is that you cashed in half of the SNG’s you played; the bad thing is that you lost $5 total when everything is tallied up. So basically, your 50% average tournament cash percentage means absolutely nothing.
On the other hand, let’s say that you win two of these SNG’s ($25 top prize), and take second place in another tournament ($15). Here your average tournament cash percentage is just 30%, but you’ve won $65 in total winnings, which works out to a $10 profit. So as you can see, the amount of times you cash in a tournament is not nearly as important as the quality of your cashes.
Like I said before, ROI is the much more important number, and it’s not hard to calculate it either. You simply need to take your winnings, and divide them by your expenditures. For example, if you played in one hundred $5.50 SNG’s ($550), and had $650 in total winnings, your ROI would be 18.2% (650/550 = 1.182).
As far as figuring out what’s a good ROI, this all depends on the stakes you play since there’s more skill at the top. But in general, you’re a pretty solid tournament player if you have a 10% ROI.
