« Negreanu vs. The Bible | Main | Skill Or Luck? It's Both, Morons. »
May 1, 2007
Tournament Marketing
I've often laughed about how little thought poker players give to tournament structures, even ones who really should. I got an extra chuckle over it today. I'd heard a lot about how the World Series was drastically improving their tournaments this year by doubling the chips in all of the smaller events. I must have had three people tell me that.
But talking to Matros today I found out that they are doubling the starting blinds too. I guess that could make for a little better of a structure, but it's marginally different at best. Yet none of the people who told me about the doubling of the chips bothered to mention the second fact that makes it almost irrelevant.
If I ran a big poker tournament, I'd just give everyone a million chips. Then everyone would go around saying how great the structure was. It wouldn't be hard. I'd just do the same old structure but make each chip worth 100 times what it was before. I guess I would incur a tiny printing cost adding two zeroes and occasionally an extra comma onto every chip, but the tremendous amount of morons wanting to play in the tournament with the best structure ever would more than make up for it, even I started the big blind off at 100,000.
In fact I just might do that. Anyone want to play?
Posted by themaroon at May 1, 2007 2:53 AM
Comments
Haha that's typical Harrah's.
People hear "more chips to play with" and neglect the fact that by doubling starting stacks and blinds, you're going to reach the antes faster. I think it might even speed up play.
Posted by: Luke at May 1, 2007 4:11 AM
Set it up and I'll be there.
Now back to reality. I agree with Luke, it's typical Harrah's. It will be worse than last year's pathetic structure for the smaller events.
Posted by: Michael at May 1, 2007 7:39 AM
Most of the serious conclusions on this issue declare that the "improvements" are marginal at best, but there is something to the psychological aspect of starting with more chips, even at the same proportion to blinds, that makes it a little more fun.
In any case, I think it's a decent choice to abandon stubborn WSOP tradition and go with the industry standard of "double stacks." Bellagio has been using this to trick people into thinking their structure is good forever.
Posted by: Shane at May 3, 2007 4:54 AM
im only playing if i can start with a billion in chips.
Posted by: dragonystic at May 3, 2007 5:24 AM
OK, fuck it then. My tournament is starting with a trillion chips.
Posted by: Matthew Maroon at May 3, 2007 1:00 PM
Sometime in the past year, PokerStars decided to go to 10K starting stacks in the weekly Sunday Million tournament - we thought people would enjoy playing with many zeros in the chip counts. We also scaled up the blinds and antes equivalently.
I can't tell you the number of emails we received (and personal encounters I had) where people said "The new structure is great!" or "The new structure sucks!"
Best regards,
Lee Jones
Posted by: Lee Jones at May 4, 2007 5:20 AM
Was thinking about this issue for some reason and I'm not sure you're main point is right. (Incidentally, I think Negeanu made the same point in his blog.
A tournament with 25-25 blinds is essentially one level behind a tournament with 25-50 blinds, right? After one level, the 25-25 will increase to 25-50. But, I doubt half the people will be eliminated in the first level. So, if we compare the second level of the old structure to the first level of the *new* structure, we see that both have blinds of 25-50, but in the new structure, the average chip count will be much higher than in the old structure because fewer people have been eliminated. So more chips is, in fact, a slower structure, on average.
What's wrong with my logic?
Posted by: Gravity at May 6, 2007 5:47 PM
It depends. Do the antes still kick in at the same time? Before I think it went 25-25, 25-50, 50-100, 100-200, 100-200-25. If it's still the same but without the first round (and double the chips) that means the antes come in on the 4th round instead of the 5th, making the structure actually worse.
Otherwise it might be slightly better, since the small blind is 1/2 the size in the first round. It's still basically the same though.
Posted by: Matthew Maroon at May 6, 2007 8:29 PM