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Glossary
Payout structure
The vector of prize amounts assigned to each finishing position in a tournament. The shape of this vector — top-heavy versus flat — dominates ROI variance more than skill at most stake levels.
The payout structure is the vector of prize amounts assigned to each finishing position in a tournament. A field of 1,000 with $100,000 prize pool might pay the top 150 (15% in-the-money), with first place taking 18%, second 13%, third 9%, and so on, decaying to a min-cash that’s slightly larger than buy-in.
Payout structure shape — quantified roughly as the ratio of first prize to min-cash — is the dominant driver of ROI variance after field size. Top-heavy structures (high-stakes events, satellites paying entries) skew player ROI distributions hard right: most outcomes are a small loss (rake + min-cash), but the rare deep run dominates the mean.
Two consequences:
- Bankroll requirements scale with payout shape, not just buy-in. A $50 satellite to a $10K main can have variance comparable to direct-buy $1K MTTs.
- Kelly-optimal sell rises with shape skew — the more top-heavy the structure, the more action you should sell to smooth the distribution.
In Mucho+MOTA, payout structures are pulled live from SharkScope, decomposed into bounty and finishing components where applicable, and fed directly to SALSA. See the rake-linear wiki.
More terms
Other glossary entries
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Bayesian skill model
A statistical model that infers a player's tournament-poker skill from observed results by combining a population prior with personal history, returning a probability distribution rather than a point estimate.
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Kelly criterion
The bet-sizing formula that maximizes the long-run growth rate of a bankroll. In tournament poker it determines what fraction of bankroll to risk per buy-in given expected ROI, variance, and bankroll size.
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Makeup
In poker staking, the running balance a backed player owes their backer from past unprofitable sessions; future winnings cover this balance before any profit chop occurs.
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ICM
A model that converts tournament chip stacks into expected dollar equity, used for final-table deal-making, bubble play, and any decision where chip EV diverges from $-EV.
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Bounty tournaments
Tournament formats where part of the buy-in is awarded for eliminating other players. Three common variants — Standard knockout, Progressive (PKO), and Mystery — have meaningfully different variance profiles.
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Bond
A capital reserve a backed player posts so the backer can recover funds if the player abandons the arrangement mid-makeup. In Mucho+MOTA the bond is invisible to honest players — settlement happens automatically via oracle.
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Action pool
A staking package where multiple investors buy shares of a player's action across a defined slate of tournaments, with profit and makeup pooled at the slate level rather than per-tournament.
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SALSA
Mucho+MOTA's MaxEnt-based tournament simulator that produces an entire ROI distribution from two structural parameters (cash frequency and heads-up edge), the field size, the payout vector, and the rake.
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ROI
In tournament poker, average net profit per dollar of buy-in invested. ROI is the headline skill metric but is dominated by variance over realistic sample sizes — confidence intervals, not point estimates, are what matter.
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Variance
The dispersion of tournament outcomes around expected value. In tournament poker variance is heavy-tailed and dominates short-run results — most observed deviation from expected ROI is variance, not skill change.
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Lambda
The two Lagrange multipliers in Mucho+MOTA's MaxEnt tournament simulator that internally control the cash-frequency and heads-up sufficient statistics. Lambda is the dual representation of the (CF, HU) archetype parameters.