Most people who play poker tournaments could care less about their average winnings. They’re simply looking to hit it big, and don’t want to do all of the mathematics involved with finding out how much money they can expect to make in each tourney. However, once you break the math down, it becomes a lot easier to find out the amount of profits you average in each tournament. And knowing this number is a very valuable tool to any serious poker player! Here is a step-by-step look at how to calculate average tournament profits.

Step 1: Keep track of your tournament information

Before you can begin to determine your average tournament profits, you need to have enough information on hand first. The info you’ll need includes the buy-ins of the tourneys you normally play, the number of tournaments played over a specified time period, the net amount of money made, as well as the number of tourneys you’ve cashed in. 

Spreadsheets work best when tracking this data, although you can keep it in whatever format you desire. Also, don’t worry if you miss keeping track of some tourneys as long as you’ve got a large enough sample size. Usually, keeping track of results for one month is enough to get a clear picture on how much you’re making in online tournaments.

Step 2: Figure out the average tournament cash

Once you have your tournament data organized, it’s time to get into the math part. And the best place to start with the math is figuring out your average tourney cash. This is pretty simple since you only need to divide the total amount of money made by the tournaments you cashed in. For instance, if you made $3,000 in one month and cashed in 100 tourneys then your average cash would be $30 ($3,000/100).

Step 3: Calculate how often you cash

With the average tournament cash number in hand, it is time to move on to figuring out how often you cash in a tourney. Just like the average cash, this is a pretty easy thing to determine since you’re only dealing with two numbers; total amount of times you cashed and total number of tournaments played.

Looking at Step 2, you already know that you’ve cashed in 100 tournaments for the month. So as long as you know how many tourneys you played in, finding out how often you cashed is easy; let’s assume that you played in 500 tournaments. To find out what percentage of the time you are cashing take the 100 tourneys you cashed in and divide it by 500 (100/500). After doing the math, you’ll find that you cash 20% of the time or one out of every 5 tournaments.

Step 4. Determine the average cost per cash

Before arriving at your final destination, it’s a must to also compute the average cost it takes you to make a cash. This number can be found by multiplying the standard buy-in for the tournaments you play by the amount of tourneys it takes you to make a cash; let’s assume that your normal tournament buy-in is $3 + $0.30. Since you cash in one out of every 5 tournaments, your average cost per cash would be $16.50 (5 X $3.30)

Step 5: Calculate average tournament profits

At last, the final step in figuring out how much money you’re making in each tournament! To find this number, you need to subtract your average cash from the cost per cash, and once again divide by the number of tournaments it takes to make a cash. This is easier to understand when shown visually so here’s a look at the formula: ($30 - $16.5)/5. 

Once this equation has been solved, you will find that your average tournament profits would be $2.70. While this might not seem like much, it’s actually a pretty solid profit for somebody who only plays $3 + $0.30 buy-in tourneys. And if you’re somebody who is good at multi-tabling then you can make a lot of money at this rate!