Return on Investment (ROI) (ROI)

Also known as: return on investment, ROI

Profit as a percentage of total buy-ins invested — the standard measure of tournament profitability.

ROI is the headline profitability metric for tournament players (the cash equivalent is win rate in bb/100). It's defined as:

\[ \text{ROI} = \frac{\text{total winnings} - \text{total buy-ins}}{\text{total buy-ins}} \times 100\% \]

Include the fee (the juice) in "buy-ins" — your edge has to beat the rake, so a $109 event costs $109, not $100, against your ROI.

What counts as good:

Online MTTs: a strong reg lives around 10–30% ROI. Anything sustained above ~50% is either a small, soft sample or an elite player in very soft fields.
Live MTTs: ROIs can be much higher (50–100%+) because fields are softer — but volume is low, so the dollar figure and the variance story differ completely.
High-volume turbos/satellites: lower ROI, but more events per hour.

The trap is sample size. ROI is brutally high-variance: hundreds of tournaments tell you little, and a few deep runs can flatter a mediocre player for a long time. A 20% ROI claim over 300 MTTs is essentially unverified noise. ROI also drives staking economics — markup and the stake split are priced off a backer's belief in the horse's true ROI.

Example

A grinder plays 1,000 MTTs averaging $55 each: total invested $=\$55{,}000$. Cashes total $68,750. ROI $= (68{,}750-55{,}000)/55{,}000 = 25\%$. Over 1,000 events that's a meaningful (if still noisy) sample; the same 25% over 100 events would be statistically meaningless.