Quote Originally Posted by blueodum View Post
But we have information directly relevant to each players "finishing ability". Coming into 2014, of Phil Ivey's WSOP cashes, he won about 17% of the time; for DN it was about 7%.

If you dial back Ivey's closing rate to 15% and assume 7 cashes for Dn and 6 for Ivey over the course of the 2014 World Series, DN/IVEY would win the bet approximately 77% of the time.

Everything is just guess work because we obviously don't know their true closing rates or expected cashes, but the above seem like reasonable assumptions.
I agree, with live poker who have to estimate because you will never have a decent enough sample size to calculate even basic ROI let alone closing rates at a final table. Just keep in mind that as a general rule regression to the mean applies for most top live players so you can generally expect future results to be less impressive than past. I'd suggest not a player exists who wins 10% of the time they cash (unless they only play fields 200-300). We've seen from online poker such statistics are near impossible long term.