The golden percentile

I've brought up the subject of golden ratios many times in this space. Tonight I want to introduce the concept of a golden percentile. It's specific to MTTs. All MTTs on PokerStars reserve money positions for a little under one quarter of the entrants. That means that in order for a player to make the money, he or she must outlast just over three quarters of the entrants. In other words, the player must fall into the 75th percentile. Not surprisingly, that's the number I'm picking as the golden percentile. What I claim is that if you can manage to make the golden percentile in the aggregate, you're guaranteed to make a profit. How do you compute aggregate percentile? I can think of two ways:

1. take the ratio of the sum of players outlasted to the sum of the number of entrants
2. take the average of the percentiles

I'm going with the second method. Running the numbers, my aggregate percentile for MTT NLHE massive tournaments is currently 73.23. Close enough for government work :-)

style flavor buy_in entry players hands entries paid place winnings

MTT   8-Game   4350   650       6    27     101   24    37        0
MTT   NLHE      870   130       9    28     964  243   420        0

delta: $-6,000
MTT NLHE massive balance: $21,728
balance: $10,063,462