If you think multi entry tournaments are going to have a huge long term negative affect on online poker then you must under estimate how fish think. They will always come back for a chance to win. It's and itch they have. They just tell themselves, "I only lost last time because I got unlucky." Not to mention these sites Bovada, WPN, and Merge are not a long term solution for poker in the United States. In fact, I can't really seeing any of them, besides maybe Bovada, having significant traffic in the United States more than two years from now (I could be wrong, but that is my prediction, if state to state legislation continues to grow).

Merge became big after Black Friday because they immediately took advantage of the situation. Hero, Carbon, and Players Only, did an amazing job of promoting immediately when players were lost on what to do. WPN missed that oppurtunity, but are going to take a lot of business from Merge this year IMO.

Anyways, I got sidetracked. I understand your concerns, but I also don't want to see re entrys go away because the prize polls will be awful. I think you are underestimated just how horrible the prize polls will actually be.

The point of the game is to win the most money, I don't care how I have to do it, re-entry or not, so you can continue your fight against the higher ups at WPN to get it changed. GL

Reentering into a live tournament and an online tournament aren't even close to the same thing. Late registration also is completely different. Most live tournaments don't even let you reenter on the same day. The structures for these tournaments are also much better and deeper than any online tournament is so extended late registration doesn't have nearly the effect.

Let's not forget many of the best live players that play these circuits think it's a terrible thing for the ecosystem and they are the ones that benefit the most from it.

I know you blindly shill for WPN, but at least make a reasonable argument.

Once again, have you been on Bovada lately? No rentries, normal late reg, and HUGE guarantees comparatively speaking. Their $162 $100K tournament regularly gets over $175,000 with no reentries. Merges $100K barely covers or has overlay every single week with a bigger buy in, longer late reg, and reentries. This is the site that hands down has the best software....

WPN's $215 got to $104K this week with the same set up as Merge. So tell me, how is Bovada's smaller buy in $100K 75% larger every single week with a normal structure???

If you bothered to read my last post I didn't say get rid of reentries. I said add some normal tournaments to the schedule and see how they do. If they do better than the reentries then it speaks for itself. The schedule already has huge holes in it. It wouldn't hurt to add these tournaments.

Entered the 8pm $12,500 GTD last night about 10:15pm EST, worked all evening, managed to finish 2nd. Again, I'm no pro, but I consider myself a decent player. And obviously this result isn't going to happen every time you late reg. But again, decent players shouldn't have any issue with late reg. The fish love it, the regs ought to love it, and in the end, WPN reaps the benefits of a growing MTT schedule.

Bovada's been doing this for years now. There's them, and then there's rest in terms of US-facing rooms right now. So comparing WPN to them is a bit of a reach. They're getting along alright - but to me, for the type of player I am, their schedule and ability to P2P remaining in place makes them the most attractive to me and seemingly a lot of others.

The ability to reenter multiple times is a much bigger issue than the late reg. Comparing WPN to Bovada is not a reach considering all the positives they have.

P2P is huge for backing operations and players who want to quickly move some funds. 27% rake back for everyone + deposit bonuses is much better than Bovada's random bonus money you can earn and it's not even close. Player names + HEM/PT4 tracking is another huge bonus for most grinders. Even though WPN's software is horrible, it's still better than Bovada's. The only thing Bovada has that is better is their management.

Given the reasons listed there is absolutely no reason why this site should be this much smaller traffic wise than Bovada. If they focused on being a normal poker site instead of running a bunch of gimmicks I don't think we'd be having this conversation.

Bovada has gained much of their traffic in the last year and a half due to Merge destroying their network and Revolution and Lock both being a joke. WPN has grown in this time, but not nearly at the rate of Bovada and they are a much better option in every regard except how they choose to offer poker.

There's one big reason, Bovadas sportsbook is HUGE.

I never said it wasn't. I doubt it's all that much bigger than a year and a half ago when their traffic was less than Merges though.

Regardless, all I suggested was adding a few tournaments with regular structures to see how they do. What would it hurt to give people more options on a pretty bare MTT schedule?

That would give WPN a chance to judge which format customers prefer while not decreasing guarantees in the current reentry tournaments. If people flock to the non reentries then obviously at that point it'd make sense to consider changing them all.

I'm failing to understand how anyone would be against this idea.

yeah I'm not saying get rid of re-entry altogether, just add some that aren't

Is it really that hard to have a $5 $500gtd or $10 $1000gtd with no reentry and 30 min late registration?

I doubt they'd ever do anything less than the standard 1 hour, but I think even a non reentry w/ 1.5 hours to 2 hours would be fine. They don't have to make them huge guarantees, but maybe do a $5.50 $1.5K, $11 $1.5K, $33 $3K, and $60 $6K or $5K if they want to be conservative. These would have no problem filling up and would fill out the schedule if put in the right time slots. These are all reasonable guarantees and if they do well over a month maybe add a $109 and up the guarantees on the rest if needed.

If it doesn't work scrap them and if it does then slowly implement this across the board. I think a no reentry 2 hour late reg is a perfect median..

+1 to everything iplayplohigh is posting itt. Reentries are terrible for poker. I can understand a second chance type thing or 90 minutes of reentry but 3 hours is absurd. At the very least, the late reg/reentry time should be capped at 2 hours. Which imo still isn't the best choice they could make for the future of the site,

And to ppl saying bovada has been huge etc, this isn't true. Their nightly flagship 55 was a 10k last year iirc and it currently gets prize pools over 30k regularly. The site has grown exponential in the past two years. poor choices from their main competition is the main reason why.

http://www.pokernews.com/news/2013/1...ents-16858.htm

Shill a little harder with things that aren't even true...

Cliffs: The WPT DOES NOT think reentries are good for poker per the WPT tournament director.

He may very well think that by now after introducing it, which doesn't change the fact that their big events in North America currently are Re-Entry donkfests.

Except your whole argument about why they were a good thing was based off of the WPT using them and the guy who runs those series wrote an article 2 months ago about how they are bad for the economy.

If you're going to shill at least have a valid argument.

wtf is with all the gutshot calling donkeys hitting all the crap the call all there chips off with? Good lord today has been donkey city on acr

you got to fold hands baby.

I've heard the phrase money grab used about reentry and I think to myself, why not? With the possibility of another US poker shut down ** and states getting regulated poker why would these companies not try to make money when they can. Its very possible that their time is limited.

** I have no reason to believe a second shut down will happen but it is a small possibility. If anything kills the current sites it will be US poker taking over the market in the coming years.


Having reentry tournements generate more rakes and cuts down winning players ROI because each time you reenter a tourney you are spotting the rest of the field a chip edge. Increasing the rake and eliminating rakeback, like merge, or doing The Beast like Winning Poker Network cuts down the win rates of the ring game players.

Why do you think Merge lacks any good tourneys that start at 7 and 8 Eastern and Winning Poker Network don't have good tourneys running at 9pm Eastern. This is done to promote grinders to reenter in the tournaments that are already running. At least Winning Poker Network still has rebuy tourneys with decent prize pools.

The more you can force a player to rake before they can cash off the more money the site makes. The best and probably only way to do this is to cut down the winning players rake to winning ratio.

Maybe the reason why these sites are not trying to organically grow is because its not worth losing profit in the short term when the long run is undecided. To me its smart business and I hope the sites can stay big enough until we have regulated options across the states.

^ All that is great if you are WPN, unfortunately we're not and we get nothing from their predatory business ethics. Fwiw, WPN made about 1/3 less than Merge last month from their tournaments and 10x less than Bovada so I wouldn't say their strategy is all that great. Crazy that a site w/ no reentries or crazy late registration made 4x and 10x their competition in profit.

To be fair this site only tracked tournaments across all networks with a guarantee of 5k or more. I'm not sure how many Mtts they have over at Bovada or even what Merge's schedule is like nowadays, but I do know that this study excludes a good amount of tourneys at WPN.

This was due to time constraints. Hard to have someone stay up 24h/day 7d/week to track all the MTTs. **If anyone here can write some software for this task, I'm paying! ** We do hope that it helps to dispel the myth going around that xyz site/network is busto b/c they are hemorrhaging on their MTTs.

It's also quite useful info for players to see where the overlays are so they can get extra value... and then eventually plug the hole for the sites, which helps them


--
Kahn

It excludes almost all the tournaments on Merge and they were still triple WPN. There's only a handful of tournaments on Merge throughout the day over $5K. I'm not sure on the exact number on each, but I know it's close to even just from playing. I'll count them next time I play I suppose.

^^ Not much to choose from on the work week Merge MTT schedule, sir. Can only track what they put out there at $5k or better. Gotta sleep sometime...lol.

Anyone grinding the $12.5k? I think I'm due for a win.

Something to keep in mind is that the sites really make their money on cash games. Before anyone spouts of pokerscout numbers, keep in mind that pokerscout isn't really telling you what stakes people are playing and what they are raking.

Not to spout off pokerscout numbers, but Bovada averages 1200 more players.... Does it even matter what stakes they play when the number is that huge?

Everyone knows Bovada is leading the way right now. The point of my post is to say that looking at tourney numbers is not giving you an accurate picture of how a site is doing.

As far as bringing up pokerscout. The point is it just gives you the number of players. A site that has more traffic doesn't always make more money than a site that has left traffic. Bovada is clearly in the lead but its very difficult to tell who is doing better between networks like Merge and WPN.