Sounds great to me. It's a real pain to be playing a batch of various MTT SNGs and get breaks in everything but the 18-mans. I've started to avoid playing them partly for this reason.

Alan

now that the volume of 180s decreased so much why dont you offer 90man turbos instead? maybe just like ftp back inna the days do them als knockouts! fishs just looooooove the knockout format.
then do some special promotion for them... like the bop with a low tier "who knocked out the most people in one tourney" and a high tier with "who knocked out the most people in one week" and i am 100% sure they would go off like crazy!

That would make it one hell of an aggro tourney. Sounds like a fun idea though and you're right about the volume, would be really popular.

The three peak hours Sit & Gos didn't run yesterday but they will be back as normal today.

We have no plans at the moment to add breaks for 18-mans. We'll look at this again once the "I'm Ready" button is available.

I think all of the above has been addressed at some point in the thread.

We are considering various options for changes to leaderboards for Sit & Gos. Some of those potential options include a separate leaderboard for 45-180s, re-structuring Battle of the Planets or perhaps even a completely new approach to promoting Sit & Gos. This is a long process though.

Given the negative reaction to some past structure changes, we are planning to send out a player survey on the extra blind level in 45-mans.

Now the Euros are over, we will probably deploy the rounded 180 payout structure that was mentioned earlier in the thread to see how well that is received.

We plan to have Zoom MTTs. We are still deciding about Zoom MTT-SNGs.

Why is it?? Someone can sit down and figure it all out in what, 2 days?

That's because the new structure introduced shortly after BF was absolutely ridiculous! Adding a bb1000 level ISN'T GOING TO BE ABSOLUTELY RIDICULOUS.

+1 to NO zoom mttsng

Three leaderboards?

• 1 and 2 table SNGs (ie 6man, 9man, 12man and 18man FR, not including Fifty50)
• 3 and 5 table SNGs (ie 18man SH, 27man and 45man)
• >5 table (ie 90man, 180man, 360 man)

If structured well, this would address the complaints about the imbalance in points available between different sized tourneys.


The reason it all bombed so badly last time was that you changed a load of stuff (actually pretty much everything) on the same day, totally without warning or consultation, shortly after losing perhaps a quarter of your player base because of Black Friday. You

• changed the buyins including rake to basically random numbers that were weird and off-putting, and which merely served to emphasise to even very casual players the rake you were charging,
• introduced too many similar buyins, creating excessive competition between SNGs for bums on seats (basically killing the liquidity you've referred to ITT),
• slashed the time per level (iirc, 15 mins to 6 mins on regular speed and 5mins to 3 mins on turbos),
• changed the increments of the blinds on each level to something which seemed superficially smoother, but was actually faster, turning turbos into hypers and regulars into turbos.

Most of these errors were eventually rectified, but for a fortnight or so it was utter chaos. Inserting one extra level into one format won't even come close to recreating the havoc unleashed on May 6th last year. Most occasional players will be unlikely to ever notice, and I'd expect most regs would probably be happy about it.

Are you just tweaking so the top spots get 50x buyin, or also splitting 10th-12th, 13th-15th and 16th-18th? Changing the second last table payouts to be similar to schedule MTTs would be great, and if you are then I just want to remind you of my proposed payout structure here. Also, will this be just for the 60/180s, to have 3k up top, or will it be for all 180s?

Please decide not to run Zoom MTT SNGs. Not only will it destroy normal 180s, it'll end up with a massive reduction in the overall number of games which are actually going off, because it's way easier to multitable proper games than it is to multitable Zoom. You can have 30 normal games in one stack, but stacking Zoom is kind of pointless, so you have to tile them, which is much harder because of the increase in movement, and also because of the screen-space it requires. Certainly anyone using a laptop will be forced to cut down tables dramatically.

Fewer games going off makes it lose-lose for Stars and regs. You get less rake, we get fewer games, and also nittier games because even casual players can keep folding until they get premium hands. I believe it would be your biggest error in the SNG department since last May's fiasco.


TT

Excellent post - agree with everything.

TT doing solid work yet again in these type of threads.

The only problem with TT posts is that they are too good. Walmsley certainly must be threatened by someone who does his job much better then he does.

TT what do you think of my idea during non peak hours changing the 15$ and 8$ 180s to 90s to help them run.

+1

Lol, thanks guys, I appreciate the sentiments, but I'm sure there's more to Steve W's job than just posting on forums. For a start I probably have way more free time than him.


One of the problems I see with alternating 90s and 180s for $8 and $15 games is what you would do twice each day at changeover time. If you do it by time, do you really want to cancel a 180man that has 170 registered, to replace it with an empty 90? Or similarly, kill a 90man with 85 already in, and replace it with an empty 180? Whatever the criteria are, it'll be hard to pacify a recreational who has been waiting at his computer for half an hour, expects his game to go off within moments when the last few seats are filled, then suddenly finds out he won't be playing at all.

If you do it by registrations, where do you draw the line on whether to cancel it or let it fill — ½ full, or maybe ¾ full? And if it's going into off peak, will it actually fill even if it's ¾ full?

The other problem I see is that if 90mans did start to run frequently in off peak hours, there will be a certain number of people grinding them, which will itself attract a few more grinders, and then a few more casual players as the games start going off faster. Following that will be the inevitable clamour for them to also run in peak hours, which will obviously run into liquidity issues because they'll clash with the 180s.

Finally, the 8s and 15s do occasionally run in off-peak hours, albeit nowhere near as often as they do in the busy periods, so they don't run into the same problem as, say, the turbo 35s and reg-speed 11s. In general, I don't think launching games which only runs in off-peak hours is a good path to go down.


BTW, related to this particular topic, I think that there should be a prominent message in the lobbies of all the current peak time only MTTSNGs, warning that they are peak time only, and that if they don't fill, they will be cancelled at whatever o'clock the cutoff time is.

TT

+1 especially the ZOOM part

+1 to zoom mttsng, to have a counterpoint... don't hate i just don't masstable so would enjoy zoom format in mttsngs...

There is a message in the corner lobby (top right of the tournament lobby) of each peak hours SNG that scrolls past every few seconds with the availability times. You can right click on the corner lobby to jump to the next message if there are multiple messages.

We are also adding expected Sit & Go durations to the corner lobby messages. Many of the popular STT and MTTs already have these duration messages and we are gradually updating the rest.

I just dont understand why mtt sngs dont have a leaderboard.
We all know that its impossible to win in the mtt TLB.

great post especialy agree with this!

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes and YES!

you're so right here.
hope they listen to this.

Ppl that are upset about zoom are missing the point and are thinking too shortsighted. Say you normally 30 table, I would agree that you can only play about 8 zoom tables at once. Now, in the short term PS wont do anything (business as usual), but eventually they will likely trial Zoom, and it will end up that demand will be high, and as such many tournaments will be zoom and it will be better for everyone.

Why is it better? A few reasons:

1. First, the only thing that matters is hands per hour [and the structure of the tournament]. Saying that zoom is bad because you can only play 8 tables of zoom but you can play 30 tables of normal speeds is silly because obviously with zoom you are playing more hands per hour to compensate, so you actually have a very equivalent hourly. It would actually be faster, because with tiling, you can prefold -- in stacking you are always waiting til your turn to act, so you never act in 0 seconds. Of course, zoom and normal tournaments are kind of incompatible, so the transition will take a year or so. But I predict that fish will demand zoom tourneys much more, because it is faster and not freaking annoying to wait 2.5 minutes for 7 multitabling regs to fold their junk hand at 10/20 every hand.

2. A tournament that normally has 5 minute levels can now have 2 minute levels with no reduction in the number of hands per level. That means your ROI is basically the same because you are getting the same amount of play, but the tournament finishes much much faster. Also, this turnover has great benefits -- faster turnover leads to more participation. Right now a tournament is annoying because you have to make a 1hr commitment. When that commitment is now 24 minutes, that's a lot more appealing. It's appealing in another way too -- say you only have 2 hours to play poker. You might play a lot more poker if you were playing zoom tourneys.

2b. Also, fish cannot stack and play tournaments. By having zoom you let them tile. If they tiled you will see an increase in play from them. This is similar to zoom cash where a fish is playing say 4 tables, but they will play 2 zoom tables.


Again you can flame me for the above "OMG STARS KEEP TURBOS THE WAY THEY ARE!!!1111ONEONEONE" but it is my opinion only so whatever, and none of the posts in this thread I think are going to significantly affect their decisions. Tbh they will do whatever they think makes them the most money, which of course means appealing directly to fish (since regs will exist no matter what so there is no need to specifically cater to them, they are already "catering" to regs by providing fish.) But mark my words, eventually zoom will become the most popular format for mttsngs, and this in my opinion isn't even bad for regs (its good!)

First off, sorry for another tl;dr reply about Zoom, but the issue is super important, so let's not get the decision wrong.

Bolded seems a little disingenuous to me; maybe you can explain more clearly why I am wrong. I think we all recognise how hands/time is important for cash games, but surely the same is not true for MTTSNGs: in these I think that most people recognise that what matters most for realising your long term tournament expectation is actually games/time. And if you can only play a quarter of your usual number of tables simultaneously then you simply won't get through as many games in a session/week/month. When you add in the fact that not even the craziest lunatic is gonna stack off with T4o first hand any more, because they can fast fold for something better, and suddenly not only are you playing fewer games, you also have tighter games. Now, obviously some randoms will overcompensate and just blind/ante away as they overdo it on the fast folding in an attempt to catch premium hands, but will there be enough of them?

And this problem of lack of tables will surely only be compounded as we get deeper in games. Sure you can fast-fold and get an instant new hand in the early part of tourneys, where there are still a large number of people left in the game to form the next table, but... once we're in the money, the good players, who would expect to run deep much more often than an average random, will still be stuck waiting for hands on a frequent basis, and they still won't be able to open enough fresh tournaments and have them coming through as replacements. Assuming Zoom 180mans, still paying 18 — as a game gets to near the money there won't be enough people left in to enable you to snapfold and instantly get another hand. And once we're down to two tables, if a hand is done on one table we will still need the other table to finish before the RNG can randomly shuffle people to for the two new tables, otherwise we're playing the same people every time, which is normal tournament style, not Zoom. It will effectively mean we play hand for hand all the way from about 24 to 9. That really will be as boring as ****, far worse than your frankly ludicrous claim that it takes "2.5 minutes for 7 multitabling regs to fold their junk hand at 10/20 every hand". The only alternative would be to switch to some sort of bastardised short-handed play, but do you not think that if there was a strong demand for playing 180s 5-handed they wouldn't already be offered? I think we can safely assume that they wouldn't fly.

Cash game Zoom player pools don't suffer from this reduction of available opponents, so yes, your hands/hour can dramatically increase with cash Zoom, but an increase in hands/hour in tournaments is neither so simple, nor so directly linked to expected returns.

2 minute levels? Lol, cool story bro.

Albeit that Stars still called them turbos, 3 minute level hyper-turbo MTTSNGs were tried last May and they bombed so badly that within a few days Stars had changed them back to the old structure. Why do you suddenly think that an even faster tourney will be an improvement and a success? Just because there's a fast fold button, it doesn't mean that people will use it properly; there would still be people stacking these, because they're too dumb to realise why that's not optimal, so when you're BB and you can't fast fold, that might be your only hand for this level, especially if you actually get dealt a playable hand in BB. And just as we're getting to the stage where the money becomes relevant it gets even worse because, with fast fold effectively redundant, the F2T will mainly be a test of your luckboxing abilities and the FT might as well be decided by drawing of lots instead of bothering with the tedious irrelevance of the running the cards out.

24 minutes to finish an MTT? Even with your proposed 2 minute levels, that'd still require some ridiculously large blind increases to happen. Exactly what is appealing about that? Anyone who has such a short window of time in which to get their poker hit can go and play 6max hyper STTs instead; one of those can last as long as 24 minutes.

Using OPR, I've cast my eye over a couple of people's names I remember from FTP and looked at a few of their 135 man Rush poker SNG results. As you know, OPR records the runtime, and they were mainly finishing between 1hr 40min and 1hr 50min after they started, which is largely the same as the current 180man turbos. Rush is the historical benchmark we can measure against here, so if Zoom were to be introduced in anything like a similar fashion then if we're playing maybe only a third or a quarter of the games in the same amount of time, how is it an improvement to be excited about if you're grinder, when there isn't the obvious evidence of a corresponding 3fold or 4fold increase in expected ROI?

24 minutes? Once again, LOL. Where on earth did you get that from? Make up some more random numbers why don't you? If you're going to spend time arguing your point of view at such length, at least back it up with some convincing numbers instead of guesses which are so absurd as to appear almost deliberately antagonistic. In one of your earlier paragraphs, you claimed that the structure of tournament was important, so why have you then hinted at such an atrocious one?

This is surely just pure opinion, and on this I'd flat out disagree. I think that stacking poker tables is far easier than tiling. It requires less head and eye movement, as all the info comes up in the same places every time it's your go, and it requires less hand and mouse movement because all the buttons are in the same places too. Plus, when tiling you have to be continually checking all tables to see if action is on you anywhere, whereas when you're stacking you know when it's action on you because buttons appear on the one table in front of you. Finally, when stacking you can get a bigger table on a much smaller monitor. Tiling requires large areas of screen space, and for is particularly challenging for those who play on a laptop. How many recreational players have grinding stations with twin 28" screens to enable them to tile a large number of tables?

Stars obviously pay attention to regs' opinions because regs help massively with the process of turning deposits into rake. Without regs the process would not be fast enough. SNGs only go off as fast as they do because the majority of the field are multitabling regs. Even in 180s. Recreational players see a game which is getting full, they know it will go off soon, and they join in the fun. If games were going off slower because regs weren't filling them, recreationals would be less inclined to jump in and the rate of games going off would deteriorate even further until the game died. You can see this with unpopular games — check out in the SNG lobby now and you'll see plenty of STTs which have clearly been there since the last server restart, will still be there until the next restart, and will never go off because there aren't half a dozen people who grind them filling the seats to convince a couple of randoms to try their luck.

And of course Stars will do what makes them the most money, but please explain how reducing the number of games will help with this. Zoom will force regs, who are the driving force behind sitewide volume, into slashing table numbers, so I can't see how the number of games going off won't drop, because many randoms will still stick to a single table, not adding extra ones to compensate.

On the whole I really don't see why you're pulling so hard for Zoom to be introduced.

TT

Excellent post again TT. Agree with everything you said.

+1