** 2012 World Championship of Online Poker -- Tentative Schedule Thread **

[fivetypes]

I agree about the scheduling, but these events now are really about the field sizes and the firsts.

People wont fill up the the higher buy ins if there are more. A lower average buyin will certainly attract more casual players and create bigger firsts attracting even more casual players.

The only people more bigger buyins benefit is the far fewer pros that have the rolls to play them all.

[BryanS-PS]

Originally Posted by Gags30

Edit: actually, just looked again, I guess only that one sunday has 2 tourneys. That's not so bad I guess. Still not sure why that one has 2, but ya looks good overall

Originally Posted by pokerclann1

And the 3 saturdays theres only 2events, alot of people have saturday and sundays free surely you'll have more players playing on these 2 days.

Saturdays and one Sunday have 2 events for several reasons. Lots of other special tournaments not included in WCOOP run on those days, such as the Saturday $320, the Sunday 500, a ton of satellites for the big Sunday events are running, etc. We have stretched things a little by including high-roller events on two Sundays, but not overmuch as those two tournaments won't affect surrounding events/tournaments nearly as much as a 3rd standard WCOOP buy-in might.

Originally Posted by DanteA

Will you run a lot of $1.65+R 3xturbos to all events up to ~$320?

Naturally.

Originally Posted by Sect7G

Please run sats with at least 1 seat guaranteed. Nothing worse to have to play a 22 dollar sat only to find out 1st prizes are a bunch of 40 dollar prizes.

I'm 99.99% sure that every single WCOOP satellite - for at least two years - has guaranteed at least one seat.

Originally Posted by brownindianmale55

start times are et right?

Yes.

Originally Posted by fivetypes

Yeh, also they were impossibru to find in the lobby last time, and why just the hours reg time?? I realise you want more people playing the larger raked games, but im fairly sure theres a whole raft of players that wont play the main games who will think oh **** it and jump in the 2nd chances.

The timing of registration for 2nd Chance tournaments has nothing at all to do with rake. It's true that we would prefer players who are making a choice to play the actual events as opposed to the 2nd Chance tournaments, but rake is not a consideration in this desire. We want the WCOOP events themselves to be as big as possible.

Originally Posted by jusgivithere

the "NL Draw" tourney should be " PL Draw" imo.

From what we have seen this year, NL Draw is more popular than PL Draw. Other opinions on this?

Originally Posted by Jackal69

sexy, just remember not to start limit events with 2 million big blinds this time, dont have levels that are longer than 20 mins and remember that 10 hours of play is plenty for day 1!

I'd like to see more discussion on this one. In the past, we have heard feedback that the limit events start out too low and that the early play is essentially meaningless. I'm happy to tailor the structures to get them as good as possible, of course. We have in the past considered starting limit events at what might normally be level 4, and basically going level 4, level 4.5, level 5, level 5.5, level 6... to start the tournament... with meaningful levels from the start but which rise slowly while late registration is open. Thoughts?

Originally Posted by broken_jia

From an Omaha 8 player's perspective, I think it's kinda out of the blue that you would introduce the Ante Up as a format of choice to represent NLO8 at WCOOP.

While this tournament has been gaining popularity + exposure by being a WSOP event in NLHoldem, I don't think there is nearly as enough NLO8 games that run in this format.

I trust the decision making ability of your team, please change the Ante up NLO8 event.

Fair points. I won't be surprised if the Ante Up designation for that tournament goes away, but I'd like to see some more feedback from the Omaha community on this one before we make a final decision. I can tell you that making this one an Ante Up tournament was a topic of considerable discussion amongst the WCOOP planning team; we're not quite sure about it, either! Perhaps we can do something like that for TCOOP or SCOOP in 2013, instead. Others' thoughts?

Originally Posted by JayPez

love the 6am start times. asia and oz can now play some events. its only 6 events out of 62.

Precisely. We try to include as much of the world as possible, and the 06:00 ET events came off really well last year. I saw nothing in 2011 which would make moving those events to later in the day seem like a necessary change.

Thanks for the feedback, everyone... please keep it coming.

[chasepoker]

Some Asia friendly time zones good job !!

[Giffordonian]

Definitely cool to see a lot of Omaha but yes the ante up is not a good idea for the NLO8...an equal amount of full ring and six max with buy-ins from $215 to $2100 imo

[elusively]

Originally Posted by redirkulous

welp, time to start looking for somewhere to live

this... i think

[raidalot]

Originally Posted by fivetypes

People wont fill up the the higher buy ins if there are more.

I'm not arguing for all of them to be high, just a shift in the balance. The SCOOP-H events which generally were $2k+ had decent numbers and big prize pools. There is definitely a place for large field $200 events but in this series only 3 events are NLH >$1k.

Large field $215 events are not a novelty and don't justify a championship series imo. Championship status is connected with factors which make it different to the regular schedule, like:

(1) Big buyins (e.g. the $5200 main event)
(2) Unusually large prize pools/guarantees
(3) Availability of variants not usually played in large tourneys
(4) Good range of sats
(5) Publicity (e.g. blogs/advertising etc)
(6) Special prizes (watches/bracelets/leaderboards etc)

Stars do all these very well but there is a danger that they dilute (1) down too much by including too many regular looking tourneys in the schedule. (FTOPS did this and it felt much less special than SCOOP/WCOOP). The majority <$1k is okay imo but atm 70% are <$320.

Another way to look at this is compare it to a typical live series schedule (eg EPT/WPT). In those there is usually a main event (eg $5k-10k), one or two larger high rollers (2x-20x ME buyin) and a bunch of smaller buyins in various variants spread between about 10% and 50% of the ME buyin. The buyins are generally somewhat larger than those which are regularly available in regular poker-room tourney schedules.

[FatalError]

Don't put the 10k on the opening weekend, a lot of people are going to be moving or relocating shortly before WCOOP and there is potential for lots to hit snags getting set up by the 1st day of a 22 day series (poker players procrastinate ldo)

putting it on wkend 2 shouldn't significantly effect any #s of player pools but should make it such that nobody will be rage tilted about missing it because of a silly paperwork technicality with stars security

[Soepgroente]

Originally Posted by BryanS-PS

I'd like to see more discussion on this one. In the past, we have heard feedback that the limit events start out too low and that the early play is essentially meaningless. I'm happy to tailor the structures to get them as good as possible, of course. We have in the past considered starting limit events at what might normally be level 4, and basically going level 4, level 4.5, level 5, level 5.5, level 6... to start the tournament... with meaningful levels from the start but which rise slowly while late registration is open. Thoughts?

If you start with 5k chips and go

50/100
60/120
70/140
80/160
100/200
120/240
140/280
170/340
200/400
250/500
300/600
350/700
---normal structure

I'm sure everyone is a lot happier with this than playing the 3 tiny levels. That still leaves >20 bets for people who register as late as possible (assuming 2hrs late reg). And makes it meaningful to run good in level 1.

An alternative is to play level 4 four times instead of the 3 small levels like they do at the world series.

[fivetypes]

Originally Posted by BryanS-PS

The timing of registration for 2nd Chance tournaments has nothing at all to do with rake. It's true that we would prefer players who are making a choice to play the actual events as opposed to the 2nd Chance tournaments, but rake is not a consideration in this desire. We want the WCOOP events themselves to be as big as possible.

So what is the reason then? I dont think having more promotion/giving a longer reg time, to the 2nd chances would dilute the main pools.

Originally Posted by raidalot

Large field $215 events are not a novelty and don't justify a championship series imo. Championship status is connected with factors which make it different to the regular schedule, like:

(1) Big buyins (e.g. the $5200 main event)
(2) Unusually large prize pools/guarantees
(3) Availability of variants not usually played in large tourneys
(4) Good range of sats
(5) Publicity (e.g. blogs/advertising etc)
(6) Special prizes (watches/bracelets/leaderboards etc)

Stars do all these very well but there is a danger that they dilute (1) down too much by including too many regular looking tourneys in the schedule. (FTOPS did this and it felt much less special than SCOOP/WCOOP).

Yeh there could be a few more big buyins, but I disagree with the bottom paragraph. The player pools are much smaller now without the 'muricans and with euro ring fencing, and the vast majority of the current pool will not be playing or even attempting to play the high events.

The smaller buyins/bigger prize pools than normal, and their sudden exciting promotion in fact will feel special to to the overwhelming majority of players (And also satisfy all 6 of the bolded points). Might not be as 'special' when you have a million bucks in the bank, but thats not what the market really wants at this time imo, and if its a toss up between ditching some 200/320 events for 1ks then I dont think it would be a good choice to go with the 1ks.

The prestige is satisfied by the 5k/10k events, and in fact limiting the 1k events makes them more special for most people.


Edit: FTOPS did start to feel less special but I think thats because they started running them like, every weekend? (j/k) Rather than every year or so.

[Jackal69]

Originally Posted by BryanS-PS

I'd like to see more discussion on this one. In the past, we have heard feedback that the limit events start out too low and that the early play is essentially meaningless. I'm happy to tailor the structures to get them as good as possible, of course. We have in the past considered starting limit events at what might normally be level 4, and basically going level 4, level 4.5, level 5, level 5.5, level 6... to start the tournament... with meaningful levels from the start but which rise slowly while late registration is open. Thoughts?

Thanks for the reply. Im not sure what more discussion there is to be had though? The draw and stud events have not started at the same blind level as the flop and mix game events for as long as i can remember which is completely illogical, and almost everytime people have said the early levels are basically meaningless when they start with 250 bbs.

If you could simply start all normal limit events with 50 bbs (so 50/100 at 5k chips) and maybe double that for the high roller 10k then it would be both consistent and more efficient. I don't see any reason to slow things or change structures for late registration since that doesn't currently apply to mix/flop events that start with 50bb and they aren't being complained about for being too fast - 50bbs is plenty to play with and for $2-500 events its useful to have the option to buy in super later and start with 20bbs or whatever for higher stakes players as that is still only the equivalent of $5/10 - $12/25.

Anyway, if you could please address this for the upcoming WCOOP that would be great. The last scoop wasn't so bad as a lot of these events were in early slots, but in this WCOOP Schedule they are mostly in the middle/late ones, so this would be a good time to get it fixed otherwise you are probably going to have events going super late and discouraging people from playing or affecting what they play the next day.

[buffyslayer1]

Originally Posted by jusgivithere

the "NL Draw" tourney should be " PL Draw" imo.

this is a terrible idea, nl draw is far more popular than PL

[raidalot]

Originally Posted by fivetypes

The smaller buyins/bigger prize pools than normal, and their sudden exciting promotion in fact will feel special to to the overwhelming majority of players.

Whatever they call it, to me this looks like the warm-up, the million and a special championship tourney:

Sunday, 02 September

Event 01 - 11:00: $215 NL Hold'em [6-Max]
Event 02 - 12:30: $10,300 NL Hold'em [High-Roller]
Event 03 - 14:30: $215 NL Hold'em

The only reason that day will be marked in my diary is Event 02. It would also go in my diary if it was a $1k or $2k. I would play the others if I happen to be there but the fact that Event 03 (for example) is called "WCOOP" that week instead of "Sunday Million" and has 9000 players instead of 7000 doesn't much change my chances of playing it.

In any case I don't think we disagree much: include more higher buy-ins (with reasonably priced sats) but keep the majority at lower levels.

[Bikini Wax]

Originally Posted by Soepgroente

If you start with 5k chips and go

50/100
60/120
70/140
80/160
100/200
120/240
140/280
170/340
200/400
250/500
300/600
350/700
---normal structure

I'm sure everyone is a lot happier with this than playing the 3 tiny levels. That still leaves >20 bets for people who register as late as possible (assuming 2hrs late reg). And makes it meaningful to run good in level 1.

An alternative is to play level 4 four times instead of the 3 small levels like they do at the world series.

This, and +1 to using a baseline level for the first 4 levels instead of playing virtually meaningless stakes for the first hour

[Bikini Wax]

Also +1 to adding an event at least on most saturdays/sundays, won't be a problem filling those I'm sure

[Jackal69]

Originally Posted by Bikini Wax

This, and +1 to using a baseline level for the first 4 levels instead of playing virtually meaningless stakes for the first hour

Great that people agree but I'm not sure why this idea of a baseline was introduced into the discussion the first place? The current situation is that for an unknown reason you have two competing structures in place for limit events - Draw and Stud games start with 5k chips and 20/40 limits (125 big bets) and mix/flop ones 50/100 limits (50 big bets). I cant remember the levels after 50/100 but both are identical and go something like what Vincent listed.

In previous feedback threads, the former has been complained about quite a lot as a complete waste of time for the first three levels (20/40, 30/60, 40/80) whereas the second hasnt been complained about at all as far as i can recall. Therefore why not just adopt the second for all events rather than complicating things further or changing the structure of events that are fine already?