First off, sorry for another tl;dr reply about Zoom, but the issue is super important, so let's not get the decision wrong.
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Originally Posted by Alex Wice
Ppl that are upset about zoom are missing the point and are thinking too shortsighted. Say you normally 30 table, I would agree that you can only play about 8 zoom tables at once. Now, in the short term PS wont do anything (business as usual), but eventually they will likely trial Zoom, and it will end up that demand will be high, and as such many tournaments will be zoom and it will be better for everyone.
Why is it better? A few reasons:
1. First, the only thing that matters is hands per hour [and the structure of the tournament]. Saying that zoom is bad because you can only play 8 tables of zoom but you can play 30 tables of normal speeds is silly because obviously with zoom you are playing more hands per hour to compensate, so you actually have a very equivalent hourly. It would actually be faster, because with tiling, you can prefold -- in stacking you are always waiting til your turn to act, so you never act in 0 seconds. Of course, zoom and normal tournaments are kind of incompatible, so the transition will take a year or so. But I predict that fish will demand zoom tourneys much more, because it is faster and not freaking annoying to wait 2.5 minutes for 7 multitabling regs to fold their junk hand at 10/20 every hand.
Bolded seems a little disingenuous to me; maybe you can explain more clearly why I am wrong. I think we all recognise how hands/time is important for cash games, but surely the same is not true for MTTSNGs: in these I think that most people recognise that what matters most for realising your long term tournament expectation is actually games/time. And if you can only play a quarter of your usual number of tables simultaneously then you simply won't get through as many games in a session/week/month. When you add in the fact that not even the craziest lunatic is gonna stack off with T4o first hand any more, because they can fast fold for something better, and suddenly not only are you playing fewer games, you also have tighter games. Now, obviously some randoms will overcompensate and just blind/ante away as they overdo it on the fast folding in an attempt to catch premium hands, but will there be enough of them?
And this problem of lack of tables will surely only be compounded as we get deeper in games. Sure you can fast-fold and get an instant new hand in the early part of tourneys, where there are still a large number of people left in the game to form the next table, but... once we're in the money, the good players, who would expect to run deep much more often than an average random, will still be stuck waiting for hands on a frequent basis, and they still won't be able to open enough fresh tournaments and have them coming through as replacements. Assuming Zoom 180mans, still paying 18 — as a game gets to near the money there won't be enough people left in to enable you to snapfold and instantly get another hand. And once we're down to two tables, if a hand is done on one table we will still need the other table to finish before the RNG can randomly shuffle people to for the two new tables, otherwise we're playing the same people every time, which is normal tournament style, not Zoom. It will effectively mean we play hand for hand all the way from about 24 to 9. That really will be as boring as ****, far worse than your frankly ludicrous claim that it takes "2.5 minutes for 7 multitabling regs to fold their junk hand at 10/20 every hand". The only alternative would be to switch to some sort of bastardised short-handed play, but do you not think that if there was a strong demand for playing 180s 5-handed they wouldn't already be offered? I think we can safely assume that they wouldn't fly.
Cash game Zoom player pools don't suffer from this reduction of available opponents, so yes, your hands/hour can dramatically increase with cash Zoom, but an increase in hands/hour in tournaments is neither so simple, nor so directly linked to expected returns.
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2. A tournament that normally has 5 minute levels can now have 2 minute levels with no reduction in the number of hands per level. That means your ROI is basically the same because you are getting the same amount of play, but the tournament finishes much much faster. Also, this turnover has great benefits -- faster turnover leads to more participation. Right now a tournament is annoying because you have to make a 1hr commitment. When that commitment is now 24 minutes, that's a lot more appealing. It's appealing in another way too -- say you only have 2 hours to play poker. You might play a lot more poker if you were playing zoom tourneys.
2 minute levels? Lol, cool story bro.
Albeit that Stars still called them turbos, 3 minute level hyper-turbo MTTSNGs were tried last May and they bombed so badly that within a few days Stars had changed them back to the old structure. Why do you suddenly think that an even faster tourney will be an improvement and a success? Just because there's a fast fold button, it doesn't mean that people will use it properly; there would still be people stacking these, because they're too dumb to realise why that's not optimal, so when you're BB and you can't fast fold, that might be your only hand for this level, especially if you actually get dealt a playable hand in BB. And just as we're getting to the stage where the money becomes relevant it gets even worse because, with fast fold effectively redundant, the F2T will mainly be a test of your luckboxing abilities and the FT might as well be decided by drawing of lots instead of bothering with the tedious irrelevance of the running the cards out.
24 minutes to finish an MTT? Even with your proposed 2 minute levels, that'd still require some ridiculously large blind increases to happen. Exactly what is appealing about that? Anyone who has such a short window of time in which to get their poker hit can go and play 6max hyper STTs instead; one of those can last as long as 24 minutes.
Using OPR, I've cast my eye over a couple of people's names I remember from FTP and looked at a few of their 135 man Rush poker SNG results. As you know, OPR records the runtime, and they were mainly finishing between 1hr 40min and 1hr 50min after they started, which is largely the same as the current 180man turbos. Rush is the historical benchmark we can measure against here, so if Zoom were to be introduced in anything like a similar fashion then if we're playing maybe only a third or a quarter of the games in the same amount of time, how is it an improvement to be excited about if you're grinder, when there isn't the obvious evidence of a corresponding 3fold or 4fold increase in expected ROI?
24 minutes? Once again, LOL. Where on earth did you get that from? Make up some more random numbers why don't you? If you're going to spend time arguing your point of view at such length, at least back it up with some convincing numbers instead of guesses which are so absurd as to appear almost deliberately antagonistic. In one of your earlier paragraphs, you claimed that the structure of tournament was important, so why have you then hinted at such an atrocious one?
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2b. Also, fish cannot stack and play tournaments. By having zoom you let them tile. If they tiled you will see an increase in play from them. This is similar to zoom cash where a fish is playing say 4 tables, but they will play 2 zoom tables.
This is surely just pure opinion, and on this I'd flat out disagree. I think that stacking poker tables is far easier than tiling. It requires less head and eye movement, as all the info comes up in the same places every time it's your go, and it requires less hand and mouse movement because all the buttons are in the same places too. Plus, when tiling you have to be continually checking all tables to see if action is on you anywhere, whereas when you're stacking you know when it's action on you because buttons appear on the one table in front of you. Finally, when stacking you can get a bigger table on a much smaller monitor. Tiling requires large areas of screen space, and for is particularly challenging for those who play on a laptop. How many recreational players have grinding stations with twin 28" screens to enable them to tile a large number of tables?
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Again you can flame me for the above "OMG STARS KEEP TURBOS THE WAY THEY ARE!!!1111ONEONEONE" but it is my opinion only so whatever, and none of the posts in this thread I think are going to significantly affect their decisions. Tbh they will do whatever they think makes them the most money, which of course means appealing directly to fish (since regs will exist no matter what so there is no need to specifically cater to them, they are already "catering" to regs by providing fish.) But mark my words, eventually zoom will become the most popular format for mttsngs, and this in my opinion isn't even bad for regs (its good!)
Stars obviously pay attention to regs' opinions because regs help massively with the process of turning deposits into rake. Without regs the process would not be fast enough. SNGs only go off as fast as they do because the majority of the field are multitabling regs. Even in 180s. Recreational players see a game which is getting full, they know it will go off soon, and they join in the fun. If games were going off slower because regs weren't filling them, recreationals would be less inclined to jump in and the rate of games going off would deteriorate even further until the game died. You can see this with unpopular games — check out in the SNG lobby now and you'll see plenty of STTs which have clearly been there since the last server restart, will still be there until the next restart, and will never go off because there aren't half a dozen people who grind them filling the seats to convince a couple of randoms to try their luck.
And of course Stars will do what makes them the most money, but please explain how reducing the number of games will help with this. Zoom will force regs, who are the driving force behind sitewide volume, into slashing table numbers, so I can't see how the number of games going off won't drop, because many randoms will still stick to a single table, not adding extra ones to compensate.
On the whole I really don't see why you're pulling so hard for Zoom to be introduced.
TT