OTB #072: My Quick 7-Step Guide to Finding Payout Structures for Holdem Resources Calculator

I received a question inside MTT Poker Academy this week about pay-out structures:

KC5064 wanted to know where he could find some pay-out structures so he could run some sims using Holdem Resources Calculator (HRC).

When you play an online session, I always recommend taking a screenshot of the lobby when you have an important spot so you know:

- the payouts

- the average stack

- the number of entrants

But what if you forgot to take a screenshot? Or just didn't think about it at the time?

And now you need to know the payouts and the number of entrants so you can run an HRC sim?

Sometimes you'll be lucky enough to find the tournament still in the lobby of the client as "completed" or "finished".

But if not, here's what to do...

My quick 7-step guide to finding payout structures

1. Open up the hand in your database

2. Open the raw hand history

In PokerTracker 4 you can open the raw hand history by clicking 'Options' and then 'View Hand Details'.

3. Find and copy the tournament ID

4. Open Sharkscope

Go to https://www.sharkscope.com/

5. Click 'Find a Tournament'

6. Paste the tourney ID into the Search box, and choose the right network

7. Hit search

Voila!

You can see the number of entrants (1,330), the number of places paid if you scroll down (159) and all the payouts in the 'Prize' column.

You can work out the total prize pool by multiplying the buyin ($200 without the rake) by the number of entrants. The total prize pool is $200 x 1,330 = $266,000.

If you want to work out how many chips there are in the whole tournament, a number that HRC needs to know, first identify the starting stack. To do this, go to the first hand in the tournament and see what you started with.

In this example the starting stack was 50k.

There were 1330 total entrants in this tournament (1,007 entries and 323 re-entries) so that means there were 50,000 chips x 1,330 = 66,500,000 chips.

You can now enter this information along with the prizes into Holdem Resources Calculator:

What about GG?

GG made the decision to remove their results from Sharkscope, but sometimes their results are added manually.

If you can't find it, then unfortunately you won't be able to find the payout information. Or, like this example, the results were uploaded, but with no prize information.

If it's a daily tournament, you might be able to find the same tournament for today and use the payouts from that. Just remember that daily tournaments tend to be bigger on a Sunday, so don't use the payouts from The Bigger $109 on a Sunday when you want to solve for The Big $109 on a Monday.

What about PKOs?

PokerStars stores the bounty information in the hand history so when you paste it into HRC the bounty information should come along with it.

Unfortunately other sites don't do this with their hand histories so you'll need to screenshot the table at the time of the hand so you can see the bounties for each player.

Make sure to check how each site displays the bounty as well—some will show the total bounty and some will show you the bounty that you will win immediately.

If you're adding this info into HRC, you'll need to know the difference.

Is there a quicker way?

Enter... HRC Ninja!

If you want a quick way to download payouts for HRC, check out this tutorial video:

What about live poker?

If you're looking for live results and payout structures, check out https://thehendonmob.com/, the largest live poker database. You can search by player, casino or festival to find the tournament you're looking for.

Live tournament structure sheets can help you out with the starting stacks as well.

Summary

Understanding payout structures is important if you want to run good sims in HRC, whether you're playing online or live.

To ensure you have all the information you need, always take a screenshot of the tournament lobby once late registration is over.

If you forget, tools like Sharkscope, databases like The Hendon Mob and structure sheets from live casinos can be invaluable for retrieving information about payouts and number of entrants later.

That's it for this week.

See you next time.