Warning: Long post ahead
Okay this is going to be a post detailing all my thoughts on what is optimal for Pokerstars to consider. PS Walmsley eat your heart out.
First I want to say that
not all of these thoughts may be completely practical, it is up for Pokerstars to decide. However when thinking about this, I always came from the viewpoint that I should think about what the best LONGTERM solution would be overall [a longterm vision], instead of just trying to find some slightly better solution that could be quickly implemented now [a shortterm bandage]. Some "problems" can be solved by small movements [for example, faster dealing], but some problems require bigger movements [for example, inventing Rush Poker.] If you always go for the bandage solutions you might miss out on bigger things.
Also as my area of expertise is 180s and MTTs in general and as such my post is sort of aimed directly at this. I don't have much experience/understanding of the 45s market even though nowadays I exclusively play 6max sngs. But as far as 180s and that market is concerned I feel I am very well qualified to speak on these issues.
-----------------
There are a few issues to consider and I will take some time with each of them:
0. The vision / Goals
1. Dealing speed / Time to act
2. Registrations
3. Rewards for play
4. Blind Structure
5. Payout Structure
6. Quick MTTs + Tourney Offerings
----
0: The Vision
What should we aim towards? Who are the consumers of these games (services), and what do they want?
Okay, firstly, let me get this out of the way: appealing to regs completely doesn't matter. It only matters in the sense that the game should be beatable for a small clip. But that is just basically a natural consequence of almost any game. Infact generally regs will win too much and so that is compensated by cranking up the rake and or variance. That's up to the sites to figure out and they have complicated analytics for measuring profitability of a game offering, blah blah blah. The only thing you should take away from this paragraph is that APPEALING TO REGS DOESNT MATTER. I only mention this because people seem to think in this thread it matters. None of the paragraphs below are aimed at appealing to regs directly. (Of course, all the points appeal to regs indirectly because more recreational players may choose these MTT offerings instead of eg. playing Farmville as a result.)
So what appeals to rec. players? Who would want to play say this [as opposed to a PLO cash game or some other offering?]
Recreational players that play these typically want to "play a quick MTT." What does that mean? This is highlighted by the following features:
What does it mean to "Play a quick MTT"? [My opinion of what rec. players want]
1. NL Holdem
2. Game is expected to end reasonably fast (1h 30m or less)
3. Game is expected to
start reasonably fast (maximum 10 mins wait but any less is bonus)
4. Game has reasonable amount of play not involving pushfolds -- for example you get to see the flop etc.
5. Sizable payout if you get lucky (upwards of 50x your buyin)
In all the below discussions we keep this in mind. Ultimately, I think that MTTSNGs being popular in the format they are was kind of a fluke: instead of evolving from MTTs and embracing the nature of a lot of non-pushfold play, they evolved from SNGs which embraces being able to start now and ending quick.
Also, this is getting ahead of the post, but I think in a perfect world, there would be only "Scheduled MTTs" and "Quick MTTs" as two separate tabs in the lobby. The scheduled MTTs would be the Bigs, Sunday Million, etc -- start at a specific time and have a guaranteed prizepool. The Quick MTTs would come in two flavors: one with a cap of 180 players and another flavor with no cap. These quick MTTs would spawn according to demand and I discuss this in section 6. The idea of Scheduled MTTs is that people make appointments to play them -- you tell them when to play. The idea of Quick MTTs is that people come there arbitrarily when they are ready to play -- they tell you when they are ready to play.
---
1: Dealing Speed and Time To Act Issues
I recently got this in an email from Pokerstars:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Pokerstars SN VIP Newsletter
A priority for PokerStars is creating a fun, engaging experience for all players on our site. A common complaint is the speed of play. In order to speed up the games overall, individual table caps based on each player’s average time to act will be implemented in the near future. Initially, this will only affect ring games. We tentatively plan to implement similar limits on tournaments.
On the surface this sounds like a good solution. And honestly it kind of is. Only masstabling regs take too long to act, and there aren't that many of them. So you can simply filter for them, and then ask them to speed up or they face a table-cap cut. But regs aren't the entirety of the problem.
The time to act requirements aren't very well written. It isn't just mass tablers that are creating a problem, its a very wide and systemic problem. When the game is slow, recreational players start watching TV or reading a book or whatever while playing (or amusingly, open more tables, which I guess isn't a problem) which causes them to be slower as well. In general the slowness at the tables isn't just because of regs, its because the time to act requirements are too sloppy. The way to fix acting slow is to impose reasonable time limits. And the answer is adaptable time limits.
Basically, right now, Pokerstars gives you the same 16 seconds per hand regardless of the hand. This doesn't make any sense. If you have a hand 10/20 utg you have a much faster decision on average than a hand with higher blinds or if you are on the button or if there is a raise infront of you etc. So we've discovered one optimization: situational awareness. I just opened up PT3 and I found out I made 250k poker decisions this year so far. Of them, 90% were made preflop and 2/3 of those were folds. So 60% of my total poker decisions on any street are a fold preflop. It doesn't make sense to give people 16 seconds for folding utg preflop and the same 16 seconds to decide whether to call an all in on the river. Here are possible metrics that may decide how long someone gets to take for a decision:
1. Street (Pre / Flop / Turn / Riv)
2. How many players left in the hand (7 or more / 6 or less)
3. Whether its folded to you or not
So for example if it is folded to you, and there are 7 or more people left to act, and there are no antes, maybe you only get 8 seconds to act. I do not have enough data to make a judgment call but what I would do is look at the data that you already have for players playing these tournaments and then find some sort of time limit that the vast majority of players are already meeting. This eliminates a large amount of types of hands that 98% of players act within 3 seconds but mass tablers take the full 16 seconds on. Now the optimization doesn't have to be super complicated, it could be something simple like you have half the time to act if it is folded to you. They could do other things too like give people a few extra seconds if it is a new account, I am not an expert in this area. But overall this time-to-act shaping will actually improve the games a lot because as the dealing and playing of hands becomes faster, structures can be made faster without sacrificing play [For example if twice as many hands/hr are now played at a table, you can now have 5 min levels instead of 10 min levels.] By the way, another advantage of this system is curbing stalling in MTTs.
The other type of optimization is targeted at people that habitually take the maximum time. The way to stop this is hidden timebanks. So for example, say you have 16 seconds to act every hand, but this is a maximum: ideally you want people to act within 6 seconds on average. So you could do the following: people typically get 8 seconds and another 8 seconds from a hidden timebank. Every hand you play, you get to add 2 seconds to your hidden timebank, up to a max of 20 seconds. So if you take the maximum time a couple hands in a row, the third time you will only have 10 seconds to act. And if you act fast for a few hands, you will be back up to 16 seconds quickly. It's very seamless and most players will not even notice. But if you timeout a few times, you will have only 10 seconds to act every hand ("AWice you have 10 seconds to act"), while if you never time out, you will always have 16 seconds [the usual 6 seconds before that message comes on in the chat.]
---
2: Registrations
Okay I know I have been a big proponent of On Demand but I want to put that a bit aside for this section. I will just say that On Demand is the only feature 100% proven to significantly improve volume that Stars hasnt touched.
First we have to ask ourselves, what is the goal of the registration system? To corral the interests of players. For example, take a random player Bob. Bob would like to play a quick MTT. He might play a $8, $15, or $35 -- generally depending what starts faster. Its very important to note that he doesn't want to wait. His purchasing decision is stymied by having to wait. For example if he prefers $35s the most but he has to wait 20 minutes for one to start, he may not play. I call this a wait tolerance. The recreational player has poor wait tolerance and may not be aware of which games can be started (for example he may not realize a certain $15/180 with 10 players regged will start in 3 minutes; he may not realize sitting at 10/20 NL will cause 8 people to snap-sit him). This is why basically only regs start games in high stakes cash. Fish very rarely start games but if they see an open seat they will sit. Why else are they rummaging through that lobby?
So the secret is to always have a seat open.
How do we keep the seat open all the time? This is basically a scheduling problem. Why? Consider the following: At any given time, if a game was just starting, how many people would want to play? If the answer is a lot, then a game should just be starting. MTTs in general comprise such a large portion of Pokerstars offerings that there is really no excuse not to be very vigilant here. One way that they can do this is just to walk away from the traditional "sit-and-go" model of tournaments -- when N people register, start it. That works for 1 table sngs and 5 table sngs nicely but for bigger ones, the following could work better: have a computer algorithm anticipate demand and determine when to start the next game on the server. When I say "start the next game", it shows in the lobby that eg. a game will be starting in 3 minutes and currently X people are registered (with a cap of 180 players registered.) The computer algorithm is actually very easy because they have tons of data. But some simple areas to check for data is how fast the current games are hitting its cap, and how many people have the "Quick MTT" tab open.
There are two more ways to keep the seat open all the time. The first way is with dynamic starts. So what that means is, instead of starting the SNG when 180 people register, why not have an MTT (with 180 player cap) start at 12:34pm? A computer should know what the demand is anyways. Another type of adaptive demand-response is a fixed kind (On Demand). For example, why not start the MTT when 120 out of 180 people register (have 6 out of 9 seats at each table filled)? Then hold open late registration for a couple levels or until the cap of 180 players is filled. That effectively "starts" the sng faster and as any reg who has manually registered can tell you, people register a lot faster when the tournament is about to start (or has already started in the case of On Demand MTTS that were on FTP.) The second way is just by having late registration in general. One thing I really liked about On Demand was that when you logged in, you could jump into 4 mtts already and 4 more would be on the way. So if you wanted to 8 table some MTTs it would take 10 minutes. With Stars it takes like 30 minutes and its really boring to have to wait.
---
3: Rewards for Play
Okay this will be familiar to people that have taken an intro to psych course. There is a very well understood idea that has been proven in studies consistently, which is the following. Say you have some behavior that you want to reinforce. For example the behavior is paying rake, but it could be killing orcs (say in an MMO.) There are a number of ways you could try to reinforce this behavior through rewards, but I will highlight two: Fixed ratio (Kill 50 orcs to level up) and Variable ratio (Each orc you kill gets you a 2% chance to level). Basically even though on average you level up about the same, the variable ratio method (the slot machine) is way, way, way more powerful. The reason is because any pull of that slot machine, any orc you kill, any 180 you reg for, the very next one could be the winner. So there is a legitimate reason to want to keep playing. Meanwhile, if you have to kill 50 orcs, people will mentally wait until they decide they want to do it, then complete it in one burst. This is because the 1st orc killed has no effect, its meaningless.
Now we must take a hard look at our goals. What are our goals with 180s rewards? The answer is NOT to get regs to grind them more. The answer is to encourage fish to play. So these rewards must be catered to rec. players. In particular:
Reward can't be tied to ROI/wins, or else regs soak up all the money from the promotion
Reward can't be linearly tied to volume (for example you get $0.25 per game you play) or regs will soak all the money
Reward chances can't be that infrequent (for example, you get $ if you make a straight flush) or not enough behavior will be driven by the promotion
Reward being variable ratio is better [but pretty hard to do in Stars's case]
The answer is basically iron-man style rewards. First you want to encourage loss avoidance, this is stronger than a normal reward. For example if you have $1 a day for showing up, people will come whenever. But if you make it so that when you don't show up, you don't get the $1 anymore for a few days, then people will show up not even because they want the $1, but because they don't want to lose their "Ironman Status" (from FTP), .. they don't want to lose the ability to get the $1 on the day they want to get it.
One structure within iron-man style rewards that I can immediately think of is a reward pyramid. You have three pyramids: bronze = $3 and lower, silver = $4 to $10, gold = $11 to $35. For each tier you get points for the buyin of the tournament (so a $35 gets more points than a $11) and you are trying to fill a pyramid with points. I could write out the point structure but effectively the idea is that for any pyramid (for example say I play $8/180s, so silver pyramid) I get to the first tier of the pyramid after 1 game played, the second tier after 1+2 games played, the third tier after 1+2+3 games played, the fourth tier after 1+2+3+4 games played, etc. So the idea is like, say I play 45 games today, I get to 9th tier and I get 9 silver points for that day. Again this touches on something that someone else mentioned which is, you want to have people feel compelled to play their "easy" points. There's a tab in the cashier where you can check your ironman status including pyramids for the day.
Then you wrap that in an "iron man" structure just like FTP, where if you have X points in 20 days you have bronze, Y points in 20 days or X points in 25 days you have silver, Z points in 20 days or Y points in 25 days or X points in 30 days you have gold, etc. and you can get either a freeroll or a bonus (that you need to VPP to clear) with it. This is just one idea that I am suggesting and it isn't totally perfect, but overall the rewards should be aimed at encouraging casual players to keep playing CONSISTENTLY. Consistent play is much better. Eventually these players might chase the rewards so much that they become a bad reg (due to how often / how many tables they play chasing "Diamond" or whatever status.) Like the old joke goes, what's the difference between a fish and a bad reg? The bad reg is at ALL your tables.
---
4: Blind Structure
For reference, here is the current 180s blind structure, which I've separated into 15 minute segments:
1500 chips, 5 min levels. Levels given in BB only, "a" indicates where antes start.
20 30 50
100 150 200
250a 300 400
600 800 1000
1200 1600 2000
3000 4000 5000
This basically comes from the old style of sngs that are about pushfolding. Regs in SNGs in general really like the 20 30 50 100 structure because it gets to the pushfold stages faster and thats the only thing they know. Overall though, MTTs should be about nonpushfold play when possible because thats what casual players want. Take the Sunday Million for example, even though there are tons of players and the average stack gets really short after a while, there is plenty of play in the first couple of hours, the blinds don't just rise up. The blinds used to go 25/50, 50/100, 100/200 but that has been revised to the new structure of 20/40, 30/60, 40/80, 60/120, 80/160, 100/200; adding a full hour to the early game.
Here is the structure I recommend that finishes in the same time:
1500 chips, 3 min levels, levels given in BB only, antes from level 1.
30a 30 30 30 40
50 60 70 80 100
120 150 200 250 300
350 400 500 600 700
800 1000 1200 1400 1600
2000 2400 3000 4000 5000
In my opinion this is the absolute best structure that Stars can offer given the 1:30 timeframe that they need to stick to. Yes it is fast near the end but the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages. If I paired this with the suggestion to keep late registration I would hold late registration for the first 5 levels, or maybe 6. However I would always have a cap of 180 players in any of these tournaments (you could also offer quick mtts with no cap for registration separately too.) This structure plays more like a real MTT where you can make real decisions. By the way if I put antes I would not have any goofy antes (such as trying to force antes to be divisible by 5) -- I would just have antes at 1/10th of a BB throughout the tournament.
---
5: Payout Structure
The payout structure for 180s is pretty good. Here it is:
FT: 30%, 20%, 11.9%, 8.0%, 6.5%, 5.0%, 3.5%, 2.6%, 1.7%
Second Table: 1.2%=10th=18th.
However it could be improved. First I feel that 10th and 18th being the same is very outdated. I understand this was done to have more money at the top but overall it wasn't the best decision.
Here is the payout structure I would consider that I think is most fair:
16th=18th = 1%
13th=15th = 1.5%
12th=10th = 2%
9th = 2.5%
8th = 3%
7th = 3.75%
6th = 4.75%
5th = 6%
4th = 7.5%
3rd = 10%
2nd = 19%
1st = 30%
To compare, here is a typical $15/180 with both payouts in $:\
(Reason 1st is different is I am using the stars algorithm which puts unused pennies into 1st place.)
| Place | Old Payout | New Payout |
| 1 | 743.64 | 743.67 |
| 2 | 495.72 | 470.93 |
| 3 | 294.95 | 247.86 |
| 4 | 198.28 | 185.89 |
| 5 | 161.1 | 148.71 |
| 6 | 123.93 | 117.73 |
| 7 | 86.75 | 92.94 |
| 8 | 64.44 | 74.35 |
| 9 | 42.13 | 61.96 |
| 10 | 29.74 | 49.57 |
| 11 | 29.74 | 49.57 |
| 12 | 29.74 | 49.57 |
| 13 | 29.74 | 37.17 |
| 14 | 29.74 | 37.17 |
| 15 | 29.74 | 37.17 |
| 16 | 29.74 | 24.78 |
| 17 | 29.74 | 24.78 |
| 18 | 29.74 | 24.78 |
I think this is the absolute best payout structure for 180s.
---
6: Quick MTTs + Tourney Offerings
This will be short, but basically I don't even think 180s should be in the "SNG lobby." That only makes sense in a world where 180s are SNGs (in the literal sense, you sit until 180 people sit down, then you go play.) But in a perfect world I think there would be a Quick MTT tab (or maybe SNG->Multitable can use some refurbishing), that listed tourneys that you could play right now. And I think that tab would be immensely popular. In the tab it would list stuff that you can register and play within a couple minutes or even right now if late registration is open. The bulk of this would be the really popular 180s products stickied right at the top, but it could also include uncapped normal MTTs too.
As for what buyins they should offer, again the idea is to keep it simple, stupid. I think the current levels offered are perfect, I would just work toward making 15/180s more popular and something that MTTers like to play. I think higher rebuys are a mistake and in general rebuys are a mistake. Even the 3r doesn't make the most sense. I get that people like it because it offers more play but it also causes fish to pay more rake by % and also have far less chance to win. What I would do is keep the play but remove traditional rebuys overall. I think "chance" tournaments, or possibly 1r's are okay. But overall *traditional* rebuy MTTs should be discouraged as I don't think they support Stars's bottom line very well. If I did include a rebuy tournament what I would try is a $12, (or maybe $24) one rebuy tournament that was 6max. This could prove to be very popular. I would also try 3r's just with a one time chance to rebuy. The rake is the same, all the rebuy+addon feature does is make it more competitive against regs -- this doesn't actually do anything because it isn't like a huge MTT where having the 1st place prize be bigger causes more people to register -- the # of registrants is capped anyways.
One last thing, in the context of the structure I proposed, I think "chances" as well as 1r works very well. Here is the first 45min of that structure again for convenience:
1500 chips, 3 min levels, antes at start
30 30 30 30 40
50 60 70 80 100
120 140 160 200 250
Again this structure is perfect for a 1r or chance tournament, allowing people to rebuy in the first 5 levels.
------
Whew, done here, thanks for PS Team to read my comments.
Last edited by Alex Wice; 02-25-2012 at 01:23 AM.
Reason: formatting
