Results - $12 Grand Tour Challenge
After 1 year, 3 Months, 5 days, and 1 minute….
The time has finally come to reveal the outcome of, what is probably a now long forgotten, Grand Tour challenge which I began around August of 2020.
Yes, I realise at this point we don’t even call it “Grand Tour” or “GT” anymore, but there are a few of you who have been asking after this article and, ever the completionist, I agree, we should share these results for posterity.
Additionally, it is also a rather nice way to wrap up the “Grand Tour” era as PokerStars embarks on a new, slightly altered, product that we call “Neymar Jr. Kick-Off”.
Wait, what was this challenge even about?
The mission was quite simple…
Having already successfully shown we could profitably conquer the $5 Grand Tour “starting” level, the results of which look a little something like this…
…we would then progress to the $12 Grand Tour “starting” level and attempt to glean similar statistics after a few thousand games on and off stream.
Okay so how did you do starting at the $12s?
Overall stats:
Overall profit and loss in USD:
Bounties per game:
Table win percentage:
Overall chip graph:
Note for the above graph:
The orange line represents my chips EV adjusted and the green line represents net chips won.
some (small %) of this data will include GT / KO hands played after the conclusion of the challenge because it’s REALLY hard to filter for GT / KO specific hands in HM3.
What does all that really mean?
So essentially the conclusion of our experiment was as follows:
We were profitable.
We won +$1100 over ~3000 games.
Our ROI was ~4%.
The variance in this format is MENTAL
What we need to take into account:
Two very significant downswings during this experiment will have skewed our result to some degree. (Something like 80,000 chips under expected value total)
I failed to hit any large bounties during this challenge which accounts for a significant amount of value in the long run / would significantly impact our overall ROI. (my largest was ~$270 from a single KO)
However, I don’t really believe the experiment can truly be “concluded” yet.
The variance of both Grand Tour and Neymar Jr. Kick-Off is so extreme I don’t really believe that ~3000 games is anywhere near the volume required to get a clear picture of the true ROI of this format.
I know many of my the GT OGs will understand and agree.
I felt this extreme variance most at the very start and end of my challenge, as you can clearly see from the downswings in our chip graph above.
However, if you ever frequented my streams in the past you will know, “volume beats variance”.
So what’s next?
Well, considering the fact that Grand Tour has now morphed into the almost identical “Neymar Jr. Kick-Off”, I guess the only way to proceed is to play keep playing and collect more data.
While I’m not yet certain if I want to commit to another official “challenge”, you can rest assured, I will be updating these results from time to time to see where this format takes us in the future (with mandatory instagram graph brags free of charge).
If you want to be notified when we are taking our GT skills to the KO streets on stream, make sure you follow my social media and I’ll let you know when we are going live next on PokerStars Twitch.
