I've watched the promo video many times in slow motion and I think I've figured out the process of prize pool selection.
The starting deck has 55 cards - the standard 52-card deck plus 3 gold cards. Spades and clubs are green for some reason. The color of diamonds and hearts isn't shown, let's assume it's red.
At the beginning, each player is randomly dealt one card. Then they start turning cards over, one by one. If a gold card is opened, it goes into one of the three slots in the center, and a new card is drawn from the central deck (it does have 46 cards at the start of the video - I made a screenshot and counted the cards!) to replace the gold card taken away from that player. The process stops when either any red card or 9 green cards are opened.
If a red card is revealed, or 9 green cards in a row are opened without any gold card, the prize pool is determined by the number of green cards that had been opened by the end of the process.
# of green cards | Prize pool in $ | Places paid |
---|
0 | $50? | 3? |
1 | $90 | 3 |
2 | $100? | 4? |
3 | $120? | 5? |
4 | $140 | 6 |
5 | $160? | 7? |
6 | $180? | 8? |
7 | $200 | 9 |
8 | $250 | 9 |
9 | $300? | 9? |
(Only the values with no question mark appeared in the video; those with question marks are guesstimates.)
When 9 green cards and at least one gold have been opened, then a chunk is taken out of the progressive jackpot to become the prize pool of this tourney, with all the 9 places paid. Namely, if only 1 gold card has been opened and placed in the center, then the prize pool is 10% of the JP; if 2 gold cards, then about 20%; if all the 3 gold cards, then about 75%. The rest of the jackpot is left for future tourneys.
With this info, we can calculate the probabilities of prize pool sizes (the one of the minimum prize pool - the only one that is <9 BI assuming that the BI in the video is $10 - seems to be <50%). I'm just a bit too busy for it now.
Last edited by coon74; 09-05-2016 at 02:26 PM.