I play on two sites with very different strengths and weakness. One site has big fields and lot of options, but it freezes and/or crashes a lot. The other site is a very low traffic site, but I've played 300 tournaments this year without a freeze or crash.

On the low traffic site there is a tournament, $1 freezeout with $100 GTD, every day of the week, with almost exactly the same size player pool. Most days there are about 72 players with the top 23 paid.

I played that tournament on back-to-back days and I noticed that a bigger player pool may not be a good thing. Here are the numbers that I'm talking about.

Sunday: 74 players, 23 cashed, first place paid $20.
Monday: 64 players, 18 cashed, first place paid $23.

If I'm going for the win that says to me that I want fewer players so that first place will be bigger percentage of the guarantee.

Since this is a low traffic site I'm happy to find just about any non-turbo tournament with over 50 players. Now I'm rethinking that.

All comments are appreciated.

Both options are actually good, I can explain this in a few ways


If the guarantee has not been met (i e less than 100 players in 100 gtd), the fewer the players. The better of an investment it is for you. Because the payout structure will have more free money on the top end.

If the guarantee has been met, and exceeded. You want that prize pool to top up at the very end of its payout structure. Say if 100 players register 15 get paid, and 23 will get paid when the tournament reaches 120 players... You want the amount of players to hit 119 and stop before the top 5 spots take a small hit (assuming you're aiming for that every tournament)..

I hope this helps!

If you have 74 players and 23 cash that's already not a very good deal. Neither is 18 out of 64, you're just going to lose so much money to those extra mincashes. They should both pay out roughly 10 people, no more.

Overlay is always nice. I regged for a satty the other day that had 4 guaranteed tickets. Only 3 players showed up.

I agree completely. Way too many players are paid but, as stated earlier, it's a very low traffic site so the options aren't great. When I check 2+2 and the other site has been freezing a lot that day, or is down when I check the relevant threads, then the low-traffic site is my only choice. If I want a non-turbo MTT that's has a decent number (meaning more than 10) of players, it's my only option around 10 P.M.

You gave me the mathematically correct answer, which I guess is what I expected. Instead of playing that tournament when the top prizes are smaller, maybe that would be a good time to do some studying. It's a tricky balance sometimes between playing and study. I try to keep a balance with at least 10 hours studying each week and 30 playing, along with whatever admin time I might need that week.

EDIT: It occurs to me that I can check the number of players almost every night, whether I play or not. That will give me the top off numbers, and I can wait until the last few seconds to register if it's going to be close. I will do that with some other tournaments as well. Thanks for your help.

We call that "run good."

Sometimes you'll get the mincash. It's money, just like the first prize. Not much money, but better than nothing, which is what you'll get most of the time.

This tournament is good because of the overlay. A wider distribution of prizes will indeed reduce the relative advantage of the better players, but the difference probably pales in significance compared to the extra 35% ROI you're getting from playing a tournament with $100 in prizes and $74 in entry fees.