ROI (Return on Investment)
Return on investment: profit as a percentage of total buy-ins — the standard scorecard for tournaments.
ROI = (total cashes − total buy-ins) / total buy-ins. Play fifty $20 home tournaments and cash $1,400 in total: you've invested $1,000, profited $400, and your ROI is 40%. Where cash games use win rate per hand or hour, tournaments use ROI because every entry costs the same discrete amount — it's the natural unit.
What does good look like? Strong online tournament regulars run 15–30% over meaningful samples; live, with softer fields and slower structures, top players can sustain more. But the sample problem is brutal: tournament variance is so violent that 100 events tells you almost nothing. A true 25% ROI player can easily show a loss over 100 tournaments, and a losing player can show a heater. Most home-game players will never play enough events to know their ROI within 20 points. Track it anyway — just hold the conclusions loosely.
ROI also applies off the felt. Backers stake players for a share of winnings, and the backer's return is pure ROI thinking. It's the same lens you'd apply to any investment — which is why tournament bankroll requirements (100 or more buy-ins, given the swings) follow straight from it. If you take one stake from a friend, the same discipline applies in reverse: report every result, because selective memory is how staking relationships die.
Log every entry the night you play it: buy-in, rebuys, finish position, cash. A tournament with a $20 buy-in and three rebuys is an $80 tournament for ROI purposes, and the players who forget the rebuys are always the ones convinced they're crushing. Six months of honest entries and you'll know whether Tuesday's tournament is an investment or entertainment — both fine, as long as you know which.