Optimal usage of Iron Man medals

It's almost the first of the month, where Full Tilt players will all be getting their monthly cache of Iron Man medals to blow through. Relative exchange rates for Iron Man medals are slightly different than that of the Full Tilt Points, so in the same way I optimized expected utility from Full Tilt Points, with the same assumptions as for the Full Tilt Points, I made the utility-adjusted table for Iron Man medals. Short and sweet.

A few quick notes:

• You can trade Iron Man medals for Full Tilt Points, but the rate is terrible and you are always better off directly spending the medals on whatever you'd get with the points, be it bonus or tournament ticket.
• For some reason, with Iron Man medals, purchasing tournament tickets does not deduct against rakeback, though it does for Full Tilt Points. So there is no MGR hit, but playing the tournament will earn you a little bit of rakeback, thus negative values of "Lost RB" in the table.
• Since we're not directly considering the value of the Full Tilt Points we get by entering a tournament here, we'll ignore them entirely. We'll see that tournaments are still the best even without accounting for this.

Item	Cost in medals	Medals You Get	Base Value	Lost RB	CE (after tax)	¢/medal (CE)	% of best
$600 Bonus	3000	0	$600.00	$162.00	$304.30	10.1433	76.2%
$209+$7 Super Turbo	1100	0	$209.00	-$1.89	$146.35	13.3043	100.0%
$200+$16 FTOPS	1050	0	$200.00	-$4.32	$122.64	11.6795	87.8%
$207+$9 FTOPS Super Turbo	1050	0	$207.00	-$2.43	$135.98	12.9503	97.3%

Compared to the results for Full Tilt Points, here we notice that:

• The Super Turbo is a better deal than the FTOPS events; with Iron Man medals, the Step 5 ticket is only priced 4.8% higher than the FTOPS ticket, whereas with Full Tilt Points, it's 9.1% higher.
• At these relative rates, you need to be roughly a millionaire before the certainty equivalent of the FTOPS event catches up with that of the single-table tournament. Of course, if you're going to play an FTOPS event anyway, you should just get the ticket for it.
• The bonus is an absolutely terrible rate with Medals, whereas it was close to full value for the Full Tilt Points. This is a consequence of the bonus being a deduction against rakeback while the tournament entries are not. If you don't have rakeback, the $600 bonus is actually 5% better than the tournament tickets.

Conclusion

All players should spend their Iron Man medals on single-table tournament tickets, regardless of levels of wealth and risk aversion.