Money EV

How to read the MTT Overview: three cards above the chart — profit, results by hands in BB and all-ins in money — and the chart's five lines, from the actual result to Money EV with the stage's ICM and PKO bounties.

In a tournament, chips are not all worth the same: near the money, busting costs more than doubling up gains, and in a PKO a call for an opponent’s bounty can lose chips and win money. That is why the MTT Overview shows your all-ins in money as well as in chips.

Three cards above the chart

• Profit: what you were paid — profit, ROI, the number of tournaments and the sample’s preflop stats.
• Result by hands, in big blinds: how much you won in total, and how much of it came from hands with and without a showdown. Below that, the same if the cards in all-ins had fallen by the odds — counting in chips and counting in tournament money.
• All-ins in money: one answer to “was I lucky or not”. “The all-ins brought — as the cards fell” is what your all-ins were worth in money with the cards that actually came. “They would have brought with average cards” is what the same all-ins were worth on average. The difference between them is “luck” or “bad luck”.

None of the numbers on the all-ins card is a payout. What you were paid is on the profit card on the left; here is an estimate of what the chips won and lost in all-ins were worth.

The chart’s five lines

The lines follow the rows of the middle card, in the same colours:

• Total, solid green: what the hands actually returned.
• Showdown, blue, and Non-showdown, red: what Total is made of.
• All-in EV, dashed yellow: every all-in played out exactly at its chip equity. Hands without an all-in count as they finished.
• Money EV, purple: all-ins priced by the ICM of their tournament stage and, in a PKO, by the bounty of an opponent you cover. It is drawn in BB, at the price of your chips in each hand.

Read the gap between the yellow and the purple lines. Where the purple one leaves the yellow, money says something different about those hands than chips do. In the screenshot, Money EV ends above chip EV: the all-ins were worth more than the chip count shows.

The ⓘ on each card explains its numbers in plain words. “Screenshot” copies the chart together with the cards.

Why it is an estimate

ICM values a stack by sharing the prize pool out by stack sizes. Payouts by place come from the tournament’s payout ladder if you saved one, and from a typical ladder otherwise; the all-ins card then says that the estimate is rougher than usual. An opponent’s bounty is taken at its starting value, because the real one is not in the hand history. You can give a tournament its ladder on its card, and that tournament is then priced by it.

The cards and the lines describe how the all-ins turned out; they do not say which of them were worth playing. For a single short-stack decision there is the “Shove or fold?” step in the hand review.

→ See also: Tournament Payouts and Knockouts, Shove or Fold.