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Originally Posted by FDSaussure
The weather has been very good in Europe recently I expect we're just going to have to accept more seasonal variations in traffic.
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Originally Posted by huesos
also, been summer like in southern Ontario, probably other places, for past week-two weeks, probably adding to the low traffic
Unseasonally good weather in a few parts of the world isn't enough to explain that away, because these guarantees and bigger were being hit and crushed throughout previous summers, and there are plenty of other parts of the world which get year-round sun anyway.
Take the 3r at 14:30 ET as perhaps the most obvious example; it has dropped from a 60k guarantee which it always hit pre BF, to 40k after, which it still hit for a while, but now it only has a 30k guarantee — and it even missed that on Saturday night, offering almost $1k in overlay.
Yesterday (Sunday) evening there was a $2.75 freezeout which missed its 7.5k guarantee by more than 300 entrants, and iirc, the 2,000 seat gtd mega satty to the $11 micro-million was offering something like 8k overlay on 22k gtd.
We're talking about small stakes stuff here, where a lot of the money flows into the poker economy, and which should always be able to attract lots of runners. It could very well be that there's simply too much on offer already, spreading the player pool too thin, and that weaker games should actually be culled, instead of adding even more games to thin things even further.
Actually, as I think about this while I'm typing it, a lot of what I'm about to say now could probably be relevant to BryanS in the Stars MTT suggestion thread in MTTc as well, and perhaps Stars should start getting rid of all the gimmicky crap like ante up if they want to do something to secure the MTT schedule.
Anyway, getting back to the health of SNGs, I also suspect that those dreadful new Time tournaments, many of which look to me like they play somewhat faster than a turbo, but not as fast as a hyper, have taken far too many recreational players away from MTT SNGs and are perhaps a hidden factor in the concerns Walmsley and his team have regarding the liquidity in 180s. They have been marketed as being for those people who want to play a tourney but only have a fixed window of time. But instead of introducing these Time tourneys, those players should have been guided to SNGs.
You want a 15 minute fix? 6max hyper STT is your answer. Half an hour or so? Go play a 9man turbo. An hour (plus or minus a 'bit')? Turbo 18s and 45s are ready and waiting for you. Around 2 hours? 180s. That's the whole point of SNGs — their availability, and fairly constant run-times. These various new Time tournaments are pretty much in direct competition with SNGs of corresponding runtimes, and once again the player pool is being spread too thin over too many options.
If Time tourneys were scrapped because they are part of what is destroying SNGs, and then if all SNGs (except perhaps the NBI HUSNGs) had an estimated running time in the lobby, specific to that particular flavour of SNG, then you could tweak the way you market SNGs and guide people to the best one for them, based on the time they have available. Do something like a three sigma, so for instance, in all turbo 180 lobbies you could say that 99.7% of tournaments of this format are complete in 1 hr 55 minutes (or whatever it actually is, I'm sure you have the data for this).
Walmsley, please consider pushing for this, and do whatever has to be done to get SNGs back on their feet. Even though you may be right about the current lack of liquidity for something such as a 10r/180, or a reg speed 180 higher than $4.50, the fact is that there should be the liquidity for it, and you need to think about why there isn't. The overcluttered MTT section surely has to be a part of the reason for that.