Also, keep in mind, Bovada does it with no reentries!!!!

Reentries are exactly why WPN will never have a more robust schedule than Bovada. I can only imagine how a fun player feels when they satty into a big tournament only to have to eliminate the same people over and over. For one it just isn't fun and two they are drawing dead. The beauty of MTTs is the luck involved and everyone being on an even playing field. That isn't the case here and that is why Bovada will continue to flourish. The reentries benefit me quite a bit and I still hate playing them.

Bovada is just much more fun to play, be it for recs or regs. Between the beast and the reentries it really is miserable grinding on WPN. They do a lot of things very right, but the ecosystem isn't one of them.

when we consolidated to the final table of the 109 mega turbo stack they didn't have players take over the bb

kind of weird

great structured tourney tho

550 entrants in the 115k, 99 spots paid - wtf?

Any chance of getting the 2rb and 10rb on demand milly sats back soon?

wtf indeed. Why are there so many spots payed? Most tourneys pay like 17 percent of the field. That is way too high. Should be around 12 percent. The $50 5k gets 127 people and 27 paid!!!! that is absurd.

That's 18% of the field getting paid, which sounds about right. When I first started playing in 2006 is was around the end of tournaments paying 10% of the field. To keep the recreational players interested, the money at the top got progressively diluted so that more and more players could be paid, until as much as 20% of the field got paid. Paying 18% of the field isn't unusual at all.

Pay steps getting flattened is happening everywhere. For a long time the minimum cash at the WSOPME was two times the buy-in. That amount was lowered so, you guessed it, more people can get paid.

For some players in the ME on a satellite, mincashing for two times the buy-in was a lot of money. Sadly, it doesn't mean as much now.

Does Pokerstars pay 18 percent? From what I remember and see now railing from US it is usually way less like 12-13 percent. I used to love the Full Tilt MTT payouts, seemed about 12 percent or so too.

I don't know what they pay now. I haven't looked at PokerStars since they left the US. If I remember correctly, I was seeing some tournaments playing 20% of the field in 2007.

Table balancing for 6 max needs some updating. I was in a 6 max PLO MTT and we had 24 players left, Yet was still 5 tables going with 4,5,5,5,5 players. Even when we lost another player and down to 23 was still 5 tables with 4 players on 2 tables.

That's just weird. How hard is to write an algorithm with steps that do something like this?

If PLAYERS = 22, Set TABLES = 3

You could do it lots of other ways, for example:

If PLAYERS < 31
TABLES = 3

All you need is a counting function to count the number of players, which triggers a statement or routine to set the number of tables. Of course you need to distribute the players between tables, including moving the correct players based on position relative to the button.

But that's just a matter of writing the program. Anyone writing a program (we didn't call it "coding" when I was a computer science major in the 1980s) who has a basic understanding of how online poker works should be able to do this.

eventually 100% of the field will get paid minus the rake.

20% average field is ridiculous IMO, and I'm glad WTD started changing some of the lower stakes to 12% average.

The big problem with 20% avg is that some tournaments pay out far more. No tournament should end up paying out 25% unless the take is reduced.

Regarding the seating algorithm I think that the reason it's set up that was is so that they don't have to constantly break up and recreate tables during late registration. If, in the above example, they broke the 4 man table, then a new entrant would cause them to have create a new table again. That would be incredibly annoying.

I believe the algorithm is the same after registration ends, which should be changed if possible, but otherwise it's logical.

I agree. When I first started playing online with 10% of the field cashing, I knew I wouldn't cash very often, because I wasn't very good yet. But I knew instinctively that if all the money was paid to the top 10%, I could study, get better, and win some of that money. A few months later, I played a $3+.30 4,200-player MTT, finished 7th and cashed for $384. That was a turning point, when I knew that I could really turn poker into something. Now I play poker full-time.

Why havent we seen any additions from the mock sch wonecks posted. He had some rly good ideas. they should at least be looked at. I dont how this site is just content on this ****ty tourney sch

+1

Nuke the abomination of a schedule and start over. Instead they add a few hundred dollars to tournaments that are at the wrong time to begin with.

I think the easiest way of finding out the expected duration of a re-entry tournament is as follows:

1. Divide the guarantee by the buy-in (minus rake) to find the number of entries that is needed for the guarantee to be exceeded (it usually will, or it will be at least close, like in the Milly).

2. Multiply the expected number of runners by the number of starting chips to determine the total expected number of chips in play.

3. Divide that number by 20 to find the big blind level when the average stack in the HU phase will be 10 bb, that's when the HU enters the push/fold mode and is finished shortly regardless.

4. Look up the number of that blind level in the prize structure info window in the lobby of the tourney and multiply it by the duration of each level to get the expected duration of the tourney.

That of course doesn't require looking up the results of the previous tourneys (I'm used to them often being unavailable). And people of all levels of poker ability can do this simple math, so there's no reason for a disclaimer about the average expected duration (which Stars however announce in the lobbies of most of their SnGs).

I always wonder why there are never any satty's to the $25k on Sundays but the 12.5k has satellites going off all day.

+1. I love WPN for a lot of things, especially because it was the first network I played online with, but am coming to the realization that they're schedule is very flawed. Not that I have the expertise to fix it - it does seem that a few others have taken lots of time to give great suggestions.

I do think that a good way to go about it may be to tear down the whole schedule other than the flagship tournaments and start over. There's no shame in starting over in this case.

First thing that needs to be done is fix the abomination that is saturdays schedule. They act like we want to take Saturdays off. There's a reason that 90% of my action goes to Bovada on Saturdays.

you're missing out on lots of rake by not having a playable schedule.

That's one way to look at it, but the later they register, the smaller the starting stack (as a percentage of the average stack.) The way I see it, if someone wants to register late and show up at my table with an M of 6, I would rather have that player on my left than a big stack.

Agreed. Actually super agreed. There are so many Saturdays I wanted to play and skipped out because there's only a couple of decent tournaments.

IMO Saturday needs to include at least some special tournaments, I'm suggesting a Turbo Mid Cage. Heck, make it a 100 or 200 dollar buy in and I'm sure people would play.

I like the new 22 6max at 9:15, it finally ran tonight. I think it would run more often and overall be a better tourney if it had 5k starting stacks

I'm a little confused on the Saturday schedule as well. Is it common that people play less on Saturdays? FWIW I've noticed Bovada also has a *slightly* reduced schedule on Saturdays as well.

They never really seemed to do this...just tear up the sched and start over. They just added slightly and made small adjustments here and there. Also agree the Saturday portion (the one day I now have to play all day) is pretty slim pickins.

3,000th post and it's one that agrees with iPlay. Welcome back me, I guess.

The thing about the payout scale that gets me is that the idea I'm surmising behind offering a big GTD on a tournament is to attract players to play. So if that's the case on a $10,000 GTD tournament with 1st place = $1,500, I'm probably less apt to play than if it was $3,000 and less places paid.

But it is happening - look at the Colossus. $11 million in prize pool with 22,000 entries and 1st place was $638,000. I dunno...more catering to casuals and recs seems to have the opposite intended effect (is the game really growing?) while diluting the game for everyone else.