Beating ROI To Death

I received a couple of interesting comments about ROI, which leads me to the following points:

The reason I started discussing ROI was to give an idea of reasonable expectations. In other words, what a winning fantasy player can expect to earn.

There are huge differences in ROI between HU games and multis.

A HU grinder winning 58% of 300 contests - which is a very good month - would have an ROI of +5.4%, assuming all of the contests were at the same buy-in (e.g. $11 entry/$20 prize).

Interestingly, this is almost exactly my lifetime ROI.

A multi contest player, cashing 40% of the time in 120 contests, would have an ROI of +21.21%, assuming all buy-ins were the same and player cashed equally between 1st/2nd/3rd (e.g. $11 entry/$50-30-20 prizes).

Now it is possible to run better than that in multis, but I think that is an average representation of what a winning month would be. YMMV.

You can obviously see why the above average fantasy player prefers multis. Simply put, there is likely dead money in any multi.

Now, Blinders argues that the rake in a multi is higher than the rake in a nosebleed HU. This is true. However, that doesn't really help your ROI too much:

Playing $213 HU games, winning 58% (the same as the $11 example), would be an ROI of +8.92%. While the ROI is much better - due to reduced rake - it's nowhere near the ROI of a multi.

Now playing $213 HU and winning only 55% (which I would consider a BEST CASE SCENARIO) brings an ROI of +3.28%. The better competition would lower your win rate and lower your return.

Blinders did have one thing right: If I had 100% reinvested my bankroll constantly over the last three years, I would be balling in the nosebleeds. However, I've spent a lot of my winnings over that time. I paid off a few bills and bought a few toys.

I'm a firm believer in enjoying the fruits of your labor.

To bring this completely full circle: You can see if I pumped all of my winnings back into the bankroll, I would be "balling" after about 3 years. This is why I said the Draftbug Millionaire would take 3-4 years.