When announcing tournaments, online casinos proudly declare the total amount of the prize pool. However this tells only part of the story and does not very much help in players deciding whether the tournament suits their temperament. There are two types of online tournament players. The aggressive players will look for larger individual prizes even if there is a lower chance of winning those. The conservative players will look for online tournaments that offer a greater chance of recovering their investment.

Therefore by learning that the prize pool is $5,000 one cannot say whether the online tournament is more suitable for aggressive or conservative players. This can be illustrated by a simple example. Consider a prize pool ‘A’ that will be shared by ten top placed players on the leader board as follows: $800, $700, $650, $600, $5500, $500, $400, $350, $250 and $200. And a prize pool ‘B’ that will be shared by the three top placed players on the leader board as follows: $3,000, $1,500 and $500. A conservative player will avoid the prize pool B because it awards payouts to only three players. He will prefer prize pool A, even though the payouts are smaller, because more players share the prize pool and this increases the chances of being in the money. On the other hand an aggressive player would not be attracted by the top prize of $800 of prize pool A and would want to try for the higher payouts of prize pool B.

But even prize pools that have the same total amount and the same number of players sharing it need not be identical. For this we compare prize pool A of the earlier example with prize pool C that is also of $5,000 and is shared by the top ten players. Prize pool C is distributed as follows: $2,000, $1,000, $600, $400, $300, $250, $200, $125, $75 and $50. An aggressive player would prefer prize pool C because it will give him a chance to win a payout of $2,000 whereas in prize pool A the top payout is capped at $800. A conservative player would prefer prize pool A because in the tenth place he stands to win $200, which is four times the tenth place payout in prize pool C. Aggressive players tend to prefer prize pools that have large payouts at the top and small payouts at the bottom. Conservative players tend to prefer prize pools where the payouts are clustered closely to a central value.

Another factor needs to be brought into the analysis, which is the buy in. Players would calculate the expected return on investment by taking the ratio of the expected payout to the buy in. Online tournaments with higher expected returns on investments would be preferred. However aggressive and conservative players would use different values for the payout. Aggressive players would use the payout offered to the top winner, whereas conservative players would use the payout offered to the last player to cash.

Hence players must assess clearly whether they prefer the aggressive or conservative style of play and must then select online tournaments that are best suited to that style. If they are aggressive players and have chosen tournaments with large top payouts then they must actually wager aggressively otherwise the evaluation will not serve any purpose. Similarly players who choose prize pools that are conservative should actually play the online tournament in a conservative manner.