MTT Poker Variance Simulator
Enter your ROI, buy-in, field size, rake and # of tournaments. See realistic bankroll swings, 10th–90th percentile confidence intervals, and the single best and worst career paths out of those runs.
Settings
Cumulative Profit
1,000 simulations
300 players — Prize Structure
Mid-size MTT. 45 paid spots. Winner takes ~20% of prize pool. Common in online daily majors and medium buy-in live events.
Runs 1,000 full simulations. Each tournament randomly assigns a finish position, looks up the payout from the selected prize structure, then adds a skill shift so that expected profit per tournament equals your net ROI. Rake reduces the prize pool size, which lowers payouts and decreases variance. Results are right-skewed in reality; this model captures the shape better than a normal distribution but still underestimates extreme deep runs.
Why does variance matter?
Tournament poker has extremely high variance. Even players with a genuine edge can lose for hundreds of tournaments in a row. The simulator shows you the realistic range of outcomes so that a losing streak does not make you question your game when it is simply the nature of the format.
How does field size factor into the math?
The field size preset loads a specific prize pool distribution. Each tournament is simulated by randomly assigning a finish position, looking up the payout for that position from the structure, and computing the net profit or loss. The three presets use realistic payout percentages: 15% of the field is paid in each case, with prize money distributed across those spots in a progressively top-heavy way as field size grows.
Larger fields have higher variance because the winner receives a much larger share of a much larger prize pool. In a 1,000-player event the winner earns roughly 180 buy-ins net; in a 100-player event it is roughly 25 buy-ins net. The probability of reaching that spot is lower, so most sessions are a full buy-in loss and occasional deep runs drive all the profit. This produces the wide, unpredictable paths you see in the chart.
What does rake do?
Rake is the percentage of each buy-in taken by the house before forming the prize pool. A 10% rake on a $10 tournament means $9 goes to prizes and $1 goes to the cardroom. Rake reduces payout sizes across every position, which lowers variance slightly and reduces the long-run expected profit of every player regardless of skill. Your ROI input is treated as your net return after rake is already accounted for.
What do the chart lines show?
The simulator runs 1,000 full simulations. The shaded band covers the 10th to 90th percentile range across all 1,000 paths at each point in time. The dashed blue line is the median. The green and red lines are the single best and worst outcomes from all 1,000 runs. The faint grey lines are 10 randomly selected paths from the remaining 998, giving a sense of typical trajectory shapes. The faint dotted line is the pure expected value: ROI times buy-in times number of tournaments played.