I wrote yesterday about the potentially larger rake in tournaments rather than heads-up contests, but as I suspected my contests didn't fill to the max. For example, in one of the $5 ones I did, there was a $4,000 prize pool and 891 entries. That's 5 * 891 = $4,455 taken in, $4000 paid out for a cut of 13.875 percent, still substantially higher than the heads-up rake of 11.1 percent, but not as high as the max of $14.925 percent. In the other contest, there were 4,086 contestants vying for $20,000, which comes out to $20,430/$20K = 1.0215 or a meager 2.15 percent cut, if my math is right. I'm not sure yet how to game this system, but it's a huge advantage to play in guaranteed prize-pool contests where all the seats don't fill up.

Of course, I still failed to cash in both contests, losing $10 more in the process, bringing my bankroll down to $953. I finished 181 out of 891 in one and 1197 out of 4086 in the other, good enough to win in 50/50, but well short of cashing in a big tournament. But you can't have it both ways - if you want the want the big score, doing merely better than average means nothing.

For today's games, of course I'm going to play one of the massive Tuesday contests they have: in one of the $2 ones, first place gets $8,000. But up to 57,471 people can enter, so I'll want to be out of phase with the rest of the pool. Whether that's using a cheap pitcher like Kendall Graveman, who got shelled his first time out, against the Astros or going chalk with Matt Harvey and talking hitters with bad match-ups, I'm not sure. I'm inclined to do the obvious with Harvey and make 1-2 oddball hitting picks, maybe even a lefty-on-lefty with someone who has decent splits. I'll figure it out closer to game time when the lineups come out.