Limp, call a raise or raise atc and fold to all pre/post action. Rebuy, job done.

Lower rake, especially turbos.

I would strongly sugest an auto deal button like on FTP .

Hello all,

First of all, as some of you might already know, we are making a change to the Battle of the Planets promotion. The freeroll that is scheduled on Sunday, February 23rd , will be the last of its kind so from now on, the promotion will only award cash prizes.

Players who have unredeemed tickets are eligible to get a prize for these tickets tickets according to the following table:




If you have at least one unredeemed Triple Shootout ticket, You will be credited next week with one ticket that you can use to redeem your prize by registering for the ‘Battle of the Planets Triple Shootout Prize’ tournament in the Tourney/Private tab. Prizes will be credited within 10 days of claiming. The rest of the Battle of the Planets promotion will continue as before.

And now over to the issues in the thread:

I play quite a few rebuy tournaments myself, and I understand what you mean. However, it is not particularly difficult to forfeit chips if you really want to, so I don't think we are going to spend resources on something like this.

There are currently no plans to change the Sit&Go rake structures.

We have this quite high on the list over features for our Scheduled Tournaments, and it will be available for Sit & Gos once the development is done.

We don’t have an exact time frame for this as of yet, however.



Thanks,
Baard

Why isn't there a promotion like the "Battle of the Planets" for players who play SNGs with more than 40 players?

Breaks in 18mans please or add a 27man turbo (these would be super popular )

No MTTSNGs hypers ffs :s

Just my 2c


When will pokerstars 7 be available?

So the $11 PKO 180s are a huge success (despite the rake, which I guess means I've lost that argument), so at some point it seems like the pro play would be to introduce $27 PKOs as a trial? Personally I'd welcome them in 90-man regspeed format, but I'm sure 180s would work too (perhaps more likely if they were turbos though?). Be sure to allow Step 2 tickets to buy in though, that will help a ton.

I would love this to happen! Especially with Steps tickets being available.

It annoys me a little that the one $27KO mtt they have doesn't allow steps tickets though, so not sure how likely this will be.

Havent played 11s yet, but 27s would be cool!

What are you replacing BOP shootout with? An extra Stein holiday?

Can we please bring the 180 structure change conversation into this thread (and leave the rake conversation in the other thread).

IMO the structure of 180s would be better if the antes came in sooner either at 50-100 or 75-150 which would make these stages playable.

Also a few more added levels later in the tournament would be great as others have said such as a 250-500 level and maybe a 350-700 level.

Changes like these would definitely make the games much better

+1 to Antes being introduced earlier, it's been discussed before and many people wanted it

IMO start with 2k chips, take away the first level and add the 250/500 level would take care of most of these problems.

Pokerstars Baard:

I'm sure you have read this thread on 180rake and sustainability:
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/61...-180s-1417934/

For these games to be sustainable long run there has to be a structure where its possible for good players to win money. A simple solution is to revert back the payout structure to top 18, and add extra blind levels to give more skilled players the chance to earn a higher roi.

Hi Baard,

What method did you use to come up with the above BOP redemption amounts?

I did some digging and came across a post made by SteveD from just over one year ago. His valuation method was as follows:

Under his method, it would look like the following:
1 ticket - $70
2 tickets - $120
3 tickets - $155
4 tickets - $180
5 tickets - $200

I feel like under the current method, Pokerstars is punishing players with more than 5 ticket (most of which are regs) for not being able to participate in a tournament that is held once a month. A simple EV calculation tells me that a $50,000 tournament that averages 500 players (sometimes more, sometimes less) is $100 per entrant.

The fact that the tournament runs once a month at a fixed time actually limits a players' ability to participate. It's pointless to bring this up after the fact, but it would have made more sense to either do an all-in shootout (where time zone differences are negated) or run the tournament on alternating times (2,4 or 6 different timezones changing every month) so that players residing in unfavorable timezones (i.e. Asia) are still able to participate when it is the month that coincides with their timezone.

Under a fixed start time, a player that plays only during the of 16:00 and 20:00 EST can win a ticket, but will never have the opportunity to realize his $100 in EV.

Please reconsider your calculation. A 50% penalty for not redeeming one ticket is such a massive penalty. SteveD's original front-loaded method seems like the better (although more expensive) method to use. Please also note that both methods have the same cap/max payout amount for a player with a gazillion tickets.

yes

Hello baard!

Was wondering if u could add a few more mtt's for pl08/nl08/courcheval/5card08?

The game is getting more popular every day. And we crush the guaranteed (in most cases).


You would make my day if u did so!

Thanks for listening.

Why do $6 45 mans only run at certain times?

Surely $6/7 45 mans can run around the clock.

can we please get an "IM READY" button for final tables of SNGs and MTTs?
can we please get an "IM READY" button for final tables of SNGs and MTTs?
can we please get an "IM READY" button for final tables of SNGs and MTTs?
can we please get an "IM READY" button for final tables of SNGs and MTTs?
can we please get an "IM READY" button for final tables of SNGs and MTTs?
can we please get an "IM READY" button for final tables of SNGs and MTTs?
can we please get an "IM READY" button for final tables of SNGs and MTTs?

Haha, I think we've been promised this for at least 2 years if not more.

in the grand scheme of things, this seems like a very easy feature to implement

In for earlier antes once again, and the ready button.

I'd like to see a 180man turbo between 2.50 and 8.00 ( but not rebuy) and a cheaper 180 rebuy than the 3.50 . Perhaps 50c or $1 .

Hello all,

Here is this week’s Q&A:

You may or may not like the Weekly Tournament Leader Board, but the 45+ man tournaments are part of that promotion.

We are currently developing the option of having bi-hourly synchronized breaks for certain tournaments, and the 18 man Sit & Gos will be the first to get these. We will try them out as soon as the development is finished for all clients.

We don't have any plans to make significant additions to the 27-man offering at this time.

As for PS7, we are currently in a period of quite intensive testing. It is difficult to give an estimated release date at this time.

The success of the $11 PKO definitely makes it an attractive option to try out another in place of some tournament that does not run very often at the moment.

I will need some time to look at where such a tournament might fit in, so without making any promises, I will get back to you on this in the near future.

The money saved will be ear-marked Sit & Go specific promotions.

This is a complex issue and I am not at all sure that your proposed solution is going to help the long-term sustainability for the 180 man tournament.

We do want there to be an opportunity for players to be consistent winners in our games, but we also need the recreational players to enjoy their experience. A 50% higher chance of cashing is a significantly increased probability of a positive tournament experience. I am not convinced that the change in payout structure reduced the ROI of regulars. However, since we have had the 27 man payout structure in place for quite a while now, we should have enough data available to do a thorough analysis on this. I will do so in the coming weeks.

Winrates of regular players are influenced by many factors. Rake, structure, and skill of player, and skill of opponents are four factors that play a part. A fifth, important factor is the distribution of skill of the players in each tournament. The more skilled the average opponent in a tournament, the lower the tournament equity is for each skilled player. If more and more regulars play 180-player tournaments, the average number of regulars per tournament will go up, lowering winrates.

Player behavior is a natural balancing force in the poker economy, because this important factor is controlled entirely by players. The better the conditions for regulars, the higher winrates will be come, and thus the more regulars will start to play 180s, driving winrates down in the long run. While a rake change might make a difference in the short run, in the long run the achievable winrate in 180s by a ‘typical’ regular (if there is such a thing) will be determined by the hourly rate that winning players are willing to accept.

If you were to come to me and say that the 180s barely have any regulars because they aren’t beatable, I would review winrates and participation of regulars and consider taking action if verified. But that doesn’t appear to be the case; there are plenty of regulars playing in each tournament. Either regulars are successful enough in these tournaments that other additional regulars have been attracted, or recreational players are liking the tournament less (not true by our evaluation), or new and better regulars have joined and more established regulars who haven’t kept up in skill are in the process of being displaced.

Of the above situations, the only one we would address with action would be a decline in recreational players, in which case we would aim to make the tournaments more attractive to them. The others are simply market forces at work. Poker is a competitive game; players will need to show continued effort to improve and adapt in order to maintain their position in a constantly evolving environment. There are many benefits to choosing a profession that rewards you (in the long run) roughly in proportion to your performance, but a few challenges as well, of which this is one.



Unfortunately, there is no scientific method available to get this exactly right. What we tried to do is to take into consideration a number of factors, and the EV of taking part in the freeroll was one of these factors.

I am writing in more details about this over in the STT thread, so instead of running two discussions in parallel, I suggest that we debate this topic over there.

Since you are talking about crushing guarantees, I am a bit unsure if you are talking about Sit & Gos or Scheduled tournaments. Would you mind being a bit more specific as to what kind of tournaments you are requesting?

This functionality has just become available and will be rolled out during this month. Unless something unforeseen happens, it will reach the MTTSNGs in about two weeks from now.

We are not planning to make any changes to the 180 man SNGs at this time.


Thanks,
Baard

^Scheduled tournaments: were crushing those very hard.

The kind of mtt's i request are normal speed mtt's

2.2nl/pl Courcheval: 300$ gtd
1.1R Nl/pl o8 mtt : 750$ gtd
4.4r nl/pl 08 mtt: 1.5k$ gtd

Just any kind of new mtt's 08 related fyi.

Thanks for listening.