The Poker Tournament Variance Simulator calculates variance for poker tournaments, MTTs and SNGs. Enter your tournament(s), hit calculate and let the simulator do its magic. An explanation how this simulator works can be found below.
Playing cash games? Use the Poker Variance Calculator.
Beta Test: Please note that this Tournament Variance Calculator is in ongoing beta. In case of errors, or malfunctions or if you have feature requests, send me a note at info@primedope.com.
If nothing works, you can still access the old Tournament Variance Calculator:
» Tournament Variance Calculator (legacy version)
What Your Tournament Results Mean
Tournament variance dwarfs cash game variance. A winning MTT player with a 30% ROI can easily go 200+ tournaments without a significant cash. The simulator above shows this isn’t bad luck — it’s expected math.
Compare this to cash games. If you also play cash, run your numbers through the Cash Game Variance Calculator to see just how different the variance profiles are. Many players underestimate how much smoother cash game results are versus tournaments.
Factor in rake and fees. Tournament buy-in fees eat directly into your ROI. A player with a 20% ROI before fees at a room charging 10% juice actually has a 10% net ROI — which dramatically increases the bankroll needed to survive variance. Use the Rake Calculator to see how different rooms compare on cash game rake, and check our 2026 WSOP Schedule for a detailed breakdown of WSOP event fees (ranging from 2.5% to 13%).
Where to Play Tournaments in 2026
Tournament selection matters as much as skill. Here are the best options depending on your goals:
ACR Poker — largest US-facing MTT schedule, including the Venom and OSS series. GGPoker — biggest global guarantees, WSOP Online bracelet events. WPT Global — satellite into live WPT events starting from $1. CoinPoker — growing tournament schedule with the lowest rake structure. Bovada — anonymous MTTs, great for players who don’t want to be tracked.
For the full comparison, see Best Online Poker Sites.
How does the Poker Tournament Variance Calculator work?
Let’s go through an example simulation.
First, you need to enter the poker tournament (or SNG / Sit-and-Go) schedule. Let’s say you’re playing a $215 tournament regularly and want to check what variance you can expect. That’s what the settings can look like:
Settings
- Players: Number of players for the tournament. We assumed 100 players (entries) for this tournament.
- Structure: How many places get paid. Standard payout tables are used.
- Buy-in and Rake: In any currency, you fancy (we just use the $ symbol) – buyin must be greater than zero. Buy-In for the example event is $215 and the rake is 7%.
- ROI: In percent, any value is ok. Let’s just assume, we have an ROI of 25% in this tournament.
- How many are you going to play?: How many tournaments should be simulated. For this example, we want to know what results we can expect over the course of 200 events.
- Sample size: How many samples should be simulated – higher numbers yield more accurate results, but also take longer to compute.
- Bankroll: Can be left blank and is only used when calculating the risk of ruin.
Click on Calculate and the Poker Variance Calculator does its magic. It simulates whatever tournament schedule you have entered over as many samples as you have entered. In our example, it would simulate 200 tournaments 10,000 times.
If you’re looking to smooth out variance, apply for MTT poker staking at BBZ Academy.
Distribution and Random Samples
The distribution shows the likelihood function for the results. The random samples show 20 random runs plus the best and worst run out of all 10,000 samples. The green areas are the confidence intervals where the results will land with a probability of 70%, 95% and 99.7%.
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