Guys, I'm all for less rake and higher buyins, but higher rebuys is just not going to happen -- there is never going to be eg. a 20r/180. They just break fish too quickly for too little friction (by friction I mean amount of times money is raked before it is cashed out.) Also because $35/180s barely run as it stands.

The best way to get rebuys is to argue for a 1-rebuy. For example replace $35/180s with a $24 1r.

No of course I don't care about Stars' bottom line, but of course they will only act in their interest. Since I am aware of that, I would never make suggestions that are obviously not in their interests because they would never do them anyways. Instead I try to find places where Stars + player interests align.

The AWice revised payout system +1111111111111 (fish fold for pay jumps)

I also like the idea of inducing fish into becoming bad regs through a reward system.

Lol Awice writes an essay on how to improve the games for fish. The only idea anyone likes is the payout steps, that make fish play worse.

Standard.

Makes fish play tighter but does give them a better chance to earn a bit more money by just folding a few hands as oppose to having to fold for like 15mins. Just gives them a little bit of a higher ROI i guess.

Rewards were good too but i doubt stars will implement this because they would want to come up with there own version rather than using a model from FTP.

Hey pokerstars, if you create Zoom(rush) sngs (on deamnd please) there will be no reason to play on ftp when it comes back for a lot of sng players. Since zoom is beta testing right now, I am wondering if there are any plans to add zoom tournaments. Full tilt's rush on demand sngs were a massive success right away and grew ridiculously fast, maybe something like a 200ish player zoom sng(turbo)? Of course this wouldn't be for a bit, but I'd like to know if tournaments are added to the agenda for zoom poker.

Just throwing out some ideas, maybe ppl itt won't agree with me, however anyone who played ftp rush sngs will, the games were so popular and recreational players love them.

+1 for awice payout structure

Big +1 to the payout structure AWice suggested, this will definitely attract new players. It is not only that it "makes fish play worse" - I know lots of rec players irl and most of them don't like/play 180s because the current "unique" (compared to MTTs) payout structure sucks below top 5 and esp at f2t. They know how much more unlikely it is (or how insanely good of a run it takes) for them to make it to the top 5 (let alone win) than to make it to f2t (bear in mind they play very few tables at once, if more than 1 at all), and thus they're not going to play 1h+ only just for the expectation of a mincash. Also, I don't see how this structure would negatively affect current players, be it regs or recs, so there's no reason not to make this change imo. edit: also, surviving up to 8 players at f2t is an achievement that should be honored (esp in a rec's eyes), plain and simple.

Also fwiw, although I too would love to see it happen, they're never going to replace 35s with 11rs ($10r+$1 to be precise) since even if they'd run twice as often it would mean a net loss in rake. They'd have to run almost 3x as often as 35s.

+1 to AWice's payout structure for 180s!

11rs will run a lot more than 35s bc there'll be so many more casual players willing to spend 11-22 on a 180 instead of 35

"WE ARE POKER."

Every mttsng should go up to 100k

WE WANT TO PLAY. DONT HOLD US BACK.

YOU ARE THE ONLY REAL SITE AND YOU MAKE US BEG LIKE DOGS

Lol, this gave me another idea, you know how BOP is a failed promotion and yet they still give away $250k a month for these?

What if they had a $1k/180 special FREEROLL every month where you could luckbox an entry somehow by playing 180s? 6 seats are winnable per day, 1 at low buyins, 2 at medium, 3 at high, and you cant win a seat if you already won one for this month. I'm just throwing this out there, it might be really exciting for some $2/180 donk to play a $1k/180.

Based on the frequency the games run at and the size of the player (esp recs) pools for each tier, it appears to me that it should be the other way round.

High pays more rake. But maybe 2,2,2 is right.

I was just pointing out that such a concept is harder to realize than a leaderboard/BoP type thing since it either seems unfair or does attract/reward more regs than recs. I don't think BoP is a failed promo at all, it just needs some adjustments to be broadened to all SNG. BoP was awesome back when I cluelessly donked around in 6max SNG, it led me to put in "insane" volume for my standards so it basically did exactly what Stars wanted to get out of it. In fact, BoP was an important factor for my decision to switch from 6max cash to SNG.

Also fwiw, I know from several recs that they LOVE leaderboards (esp short term ones giving them a higher chance to be placed due to higher variance, e.g. daily or weekly leaderboards), they want their name to be listed somewehere on a homepage, be it only for a couple days. I can confirm that from my own experience; it felt so great to be listed amongst the best players and lead the BoP orbit for an entire week (up until the very last hour, but the resulting 2nd place was still an awesome achievement, not only because of the money but because of the feeling that I made myself a name so to say).

Since my post was too noisy for players I've decided to post a summary. (My longer post was directed more specifically at PS reps who care about the details.)


Summary

• Suggestions should be aimed at attracting recreational players.
  
  
• Slow games can be fixed by asking slow players to stop, but a better approach is to give less time to act when it is folded to you, and give less time when you have played the last couple hands very slowly.
  
  
• The number one determining factor in whether a fish plays is whether a seat is open or not. To keep the seat open, try starting the MTT when 120 players register; or have it start N minutes after 60 people register, and hold late registration open in both cases until 180 people register. Ideally, a few games should always be open for late registration at all times.
  
  
• The old blind structure starts at 10/20, gets to 75/150 after 15 minutes, 600/1200 after an hour, and 3/6000 after 90 minutes. The best blind structure in my opinion starts at 15/30, gets to 75/150 after 30 minutes, 6/1200 after 66 minutes and 3/6000 after 90 minutes. The reason this is better is because it has almost 5x as much time spent with 25bb-50bb stacks, and this has plenty of flop play. Recreational players that play a quick MTT like seeing the flop and "playing poker" instead of just purely pushfolding.
  
  
• This should be the payout structure:
  

  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

double ice, ur suggested blind structure cuts a lot into regs' bottom line imo. it would make an average tourney last at least +50% longer I guess (counting start to bust which is what matters, not start to end)

ok first, believe me, if they could start the tournament at 100/200 i would play these. i love superfast structures, infact since jan 1st all i have played is hyperturbos. but that is not what the majority want.

now to your point, by similar reasoning, sunday million having the first 6 levels cuts into a regs bottom line too then. but why did they expand the levels there? why did they add 3 levels instead of remove 3 levels? its because more fish will play.

also why have rebuys? by similar reasoning playing a 3r instead of a $9 freezeout cuts into your bottom line because with triple chips the average tourney length (counting start to bust) is longer.

i think if 180s are marketed more as a "quick mtt with a seat open any time of the day" instead of a degen jam fest right from level 4 [read: a sng], it would attract a lot more players that overall really hate the 15/30, 25/50, 50/100 blind jumps. real mtts in the Tourney-> tab have already caught on to a more legit structure but 180s are treated still like sngs instead of mtts that they actually are.

I kind of like the general idea of having seats available all the time, but would not like to see Stars just copying FTP's On-Demand-SNG; I'd rather see them showing up with a new but similar idea, which ofc shouldn't be too complicated. Here's my contribution:

144man SNG (Extended Reg., 200max)
- SNG starts when 144 entrants reached
- max number of simultaneously active players remains at 144 all the time
- whenever someone busts someone else can take his seat (no 2nd chance)
- extended reg ends at either 200 entrants reached or after 15min into the game, whichever happens first

Ideally the entrants cap and extended reg duration should harmonise in a way so that the cap isn't always reached apart from peak times, i.e. the games remain at ~180 players on avg.

nooooooooooooooo

It was the On Demand aspect that attracted the players, the rush format just destroys table dynamics and reduces us all to HUD-dependant robots. You get more hands per hour with rush, which is ideal for ring games. But tournament players want more games per hour, and rush just makes that more difficult.

This, + no one wants fish to quick-fold hands and tighten up, nor does one want them to bust faster than they can deposit. Instead, we want them to stick to their 40/7 style (which they mainly do out of boredom and impatience imo) and feel comfortable with it.

Milking fish >>> slaughtering them

Warning - almost as tl;dr as Alex's post

Both of these variations could work okay-ish, as long as you're only keeping one lobby open for registering at a time. Having multiple tourneys open at once will only make the SNG lobby even more untidy than it already is (bearing in mind that, apparently, most recreationals don't use the lobby filters like we do). I know that it has been cleaned up with all the columns, and better filter options, but even so, there's still a lot of games to choose from, and we don't want to add more. People given too many choices are often wracked with indecision and don't choose at all. Remember the last time you went out for a meal, and someone took ten minutes just to decide on the crab-cake starter? And then asked for more time to change their mind again when the waiter actually came round and took the order? Doesn't happen at home when you're at home, when the options are more simple; take it or leave it!

Also, if you give them a specific start time and leave them open for late reg up to 180 entrants then they start to blur into scheduled MTTs, which risks a drop off in recreationals, who want to sit and go. Will they disappear to STTs, or cash games where they can be dealt in next hand? We know they'd still be basically the same thing, 180s instead of "proper" MTTs, but will recreationals continue to appreciate the subtle differences?

As they are, the 180s still work quite well, so do we really want to risk breaking it again? We all remember the huge drop-off in games for a couple of weeks last May when Stars had weird buyins and different structures, and that volume only picked up again when it was returned to "normal". And yes, I know it was just after BF, which obviously didn't help, but the games died even more than the BF effect for that couple of weeks, until Stars revived them by abandoning most of the huge changes they had implemented.

However, no late reg would mean that some games won't make the 180 cap by the time the server determines they are to start, meaning there would be slightly more tournies running, with slightly fewer players in each; this means regs are having to play more games, and hence pay more rake, to get access to the same amount of recreational money — I don't think we want that!

Confusing lobby again. Yes, FTP's On Demand was successful, but at small buyins, on a smaller site where their lobby had fewer possible games to choose from (and a better filter too imo). Will an On Demand-type availability work for all buyins, or will the bigger ones just never fill, so we pay more rake per recreational dollar that gets to the table?

Of course, I may be too pessimistic, and it could be that On Demand-type availability would be hugely successful on Stars too, but it is dangerous to assume that just because it worked there, it will work here too. Because of what happened to FTP there is a lot of ill-feeling towards them out there, amongst regs and recreationals alike; irrespective of what they actually did or didn't do, FTP nevertheless vanished from our computer screens with perhaps $100m of customer money amid accusations of being a Ponzi scheme, and anything which looks like it might be reworking of an idea from them could backfire on the next company to attempt to implement it.

I agree that some sort of Ironman type rewards for repeated play might be really good, like some sort of Pavlov's dogtreats — sending an email to prompt people about their daily play rewards will eventually lead to players remembering it just by seeing their computer and they might start to log on for their daily game without reading their reminder. But with the Stars VIP system currently being tied directly to the calendar (with monthly statuses and SN/SNE) I think we'll be lucky to see this, and certainly not this year.

Not quite sure I understood the bit about killing orcs though...

Hell no. At least not this structure. You're effectively playing lotto just when the money starts to become significant. Remember the hate Stars got when they did this last May? Absolutely everyone objected to the hyperturbo feel of the final table. I doubt that anything has changed, people will still hate it.

What is this 1:30 timeframe you talk about? FTs are often starting at around 1.5k/3k (1:25-1:30 depending on synch break), so that's about the start of the FT, not the finish. And anyway, once a 1-tabling recreational gets that deep they're almost always only going to be thinking about the money they're about to win, and playing ten or twenty minutes extra before they have to do whatever else is really unlikely to bother them if they get as much as fifty times the buyin back at the end. If you wanted to smooth out the structure and have three minute levels then you need to introduce a couple more levels, perhaps something like this

20 30 40 50 60
80 100 120 150 180
210a 240 270 300 350
400 450 500 550 600
700 800 900 1k 1200
1400 1600 2k 2500 3k <--1:30 at the end of this level
3500 4k 4500 5k 6k
7k 8k 9k 10k 12k


Antes come in at level 11 in this structure, after ½ hour, same time as now, to maintain the early stack depth. Otherwise, recreationals stacks will bleed even faster and they won't even notice why, they'll just feel like their stack has gone too fast; starting with antes just seems terrible to me in this regard, and is surely totally counterproductive to your plan of retaining stack depth early on.

Last year Stars tried this without enough extra levels imo; I think it was a good idea poorly executed.

Really like this idea, but I'd skim about 0.75% from 1st and give it to 3rd, which looks a bit anaemic, so 1st would be approx $725, and 3rd approx $265.

Seems like the 60s ran pretty much as well as 35s in peak time. Maybe they could just be a weekend thing and run only on friday, saturday and sunday