I recently asked the BARGE list if anyone knew of a site that displayed tournament structure and payout in addition to the standard information about buy-ins and times.BARGEr Mark T. pointed me to the exact resource I was hoping to find, Arnold Snyder's Las Vegas Poker Tournament Guide.
What makes this guide so incredibly useful is Snyder's Patience Factor Formula, which looks at the depth of the starting stacks, the time of each level, and assigns a number between 1 and 10 for how patient you can be when selecting the strength of your starting hands. Tournaments with high numbers tend to be longer and reward (in the long term) the most skilled players, while tournaments with low numbers tend to be faster and introduce a much greater luck factor.
This guide is one of (if not the single) most useful tournament guide I've ever seen. If you want to really test your skill, you find one with a high patience factor, like Bellagio's $540 2PM Monday tourney, which comes in at a very challenging 9. If you want to gambool it up and take your chances against an army of pushmonkeys, you may want to check out the Aladdin's $55 11AM tourney, which has a Full Tilt Poker $2 Turbo rating of 1.65.
So next time you head to Vegas (or any of the other cities linked in the guide, including Los Angeles and Atlantic City,, if you're honest with yourself about your skill level and know how much money you're willing to risk on your buy-ins, you can use this guide to find where your EV is theoretically the most positive.
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