Hey all,

Before I get into the multi-quote wall...

1. Most of this week is focused on increasing guarantees. Some have been raised in the upcoming weekend majors, but most of what is being increased will begin play on Monday. There will be a lot of boost in the lobby!
2. Any feedback on the new feature in the Bigs? Any other ideas on how/where to use it?
3. The Storm no longer has re-entry while the Million will allow one. We foresee a better performance in the Million this week and will make a decision on Monday to remove re-entry or not. Regardless, during EPT Barcelona, the Million will likely be re-entry again.
4. The changes to Omania have done very well. Prize pools are increasing and the Saturday versions appear to be popular. The integration of this brand provides more flexibility and while there's no planned changes at this moment, updating this brand in the future will be painless. 
5. $1.50, $3, and $15 32-player HUSNGs have been added to the lobby. While they will not appear in tourney/regular like their $7 counterpart, we hope you’ll give them a try!
6. In the spirit of MicroMillions, the following micro-stakes tournaments have been added to the schedule starting Monday: 14:19 $3.30 PLO, 17:49 $4.40 PLO, 22:49 $2.20 PLO PKO, 14:46 $4.40 PLO8 [8-Max], 13:42 $2.20 NLO8, 19:25 $2.20 NLHE, and 21:15 $2.20 NLHE. Enjoy! All times are in ET.
7. Additionally, this week’s Sunday Storm will award 25 tables with MicroMillions Main Event tickets 15 minutes after it begins. GL!

We’ve created new pay tables for all table sizes and ratios. The most commonly used, but new and improved 1-in-6 pay table guarantees a 1.75x min-cash. These new pay tables are not yet fully implemented, but will be over the next couple of weeks.

I can't say I'm the biggest fan of this format, but regardless we do not have the ability to run this format as an MTT.

I'm going to discuss this with my colleagues. I don't think generic satellites will be added in the immediate future, but since the new schedule has fewer buy-in levels, I think there could be something to the idea...

If late registration was dropped to one hour, two things would happen:

• We would receive complaints because some players aren't able to join until later
• The prize pools would be smaller

It is difficult to try to balance what all players want. Why do you feel players shouldn't be able to sit down with <30BB?

There is a possibility of new majors in the ~21:00 time slot in the future. Based on your feedback, I think you'd like them! I’m also considering some changes to the non-branded structures to make them slightly faster at the beginning and slower at the end.

Something for your peers to bear in mind is that you mentioned above not liking playing for 2.5-3 hours and having nothing to show for it. There's only two ways to counteract this: pay more players and speeding up the structure. Doing the latter results in lower prize pools and guarantees, while doing the former results in complaints here!

They are indeed all hypers. I don't foresee this changing for the time being. Turbo deep satellites would need to start almost two hours before the target in order to end at a reasonable time within late registration. Considering that there is a Hot every hour, it would undoubtedly create some confusion and frustration. Quicker turbo satellite formats aren't nearly as popular.

Something to consider of course, but I'm going to let Omania breathe for a while. Thanks for the suggestion!

It may not help when it is 9-handed, but it will certainly deepen the average stack as play continues. I cannot change every single Bigs structure based on its average number of entrants. The only option would be to use the new functionality more extensively. For instance, increase the level times at X% of the field or Y players in every Big. Regardless, it has only been two days since the changes were put into place so I won't be changing them for the time being.

Saturdays are already pretty special with the bigger Omanias! They've all had their guarantees increased beginning next week.

I think you forgot to send $0.01 to KidPoker

As a general rule, I think this type of appointment poker (spanning the course of a month) works much better as a promotion than a recurring tournament. This also reduces the number "I couldn't show up on Sunday refund pls?" emails we'd receive because we could have T&Cs

Thanks for your feedback. As for the bolded, not all MTTs should be put under the same umbrella. Which tournaments are you referencing? A $1.10 freezeout will never be treated the same as the Million.

I do not think a $530 FLO8 would be a good addition to the schedule. When the $215 was removed, it was getting less than 20 entrants per week. If a branded FLO8 returns (which wouldn't happen in the summer), it would likely be at the $82 level.

I go back and forth on this one. Believe it or not, I'd written it down to ask the team what they think. Any other thoughts here? It is inevitable that it would cannibalize play from the $215 major, but it is one of the biggest daily tournaments we run...
I've passed on this feedback, thanks.

I’m glad this format has been well-received! Thanks for your suggestion. It won’t be implemented right now, but I’ll keep in mind as I review the schedule.

We're trying these pay tables because we feel it provides a fair experience around the final table for all. Haven't you ever been the short stack at the 3-handed table with 7 left and felt at a disadvantage? If we go hand-for-hand at both 8 and 7 players, that disadvantage is mitigated as much as possible without actually having a 7-handed final table. From my perspective, this is typically the sort of common sense solution players on this forum seek out in our tournaments, so I'm surprised it isn't well-received.

I'm not sure this solution is a large improvement, 5handed ft's for 4max, 7handed for 6max and 9handed for 8max would be a lot better. No extra money for reaching the ft compared to bubbling it doesn't feel good.

Firstly, thanks Luke for all the feedback and some nice improvements and ideas, as well as explaining ur position and opinion on things in ways that I understand.

You have been putting some extra effort in, and it will benefit all sides.

Straight up, starting to like you more and more everyday.

I am (ironically enough) enjoying the MMs schedule at first glance. I like that it is focused at micro guys less then low stakes guys- which has been the trend in the past. The gtds are not decent or good but not bad, and I don't hate the formats soooo good work, imo.

I agree

+1

Hey Luke.

The Sit&Go 2.50$ 90 Players are running very bad, only about 5/Day. I think if you change this in 90 Players 3$ Knockout Games much more will play this. But don`t change this into Turbo games, take the same structure as the 1.50$ 90 Players Knockout Games!
Please think about this!

As others have suggested, I like the structure that starts off with 20 > 30 > 50 > 100, or a structure similar to the reg-speed STTs.

I'll try to address my thoughts on the three points you made above, but they all kind of mix, so if something isn't clear, let me know.

With regards to shortening the late registration period, you raised two points:

To this I say, so what? Some players want to play every tournament on the schedule, but at some point, they have to realize that that is not always possible. If you continually try to accommodate every player that wants to play every tournament they will end up with longer and longer late registration periods (as has happened, they went from 10 minutes > 30 > 60 > 2 hours+). If there were tournaments starting more frequently they could register for something new without having to fill a gap with already-running tournaments. For example, instead of a single $2.20 tournament with 2 hours late-reg, do two separate tournaments with 1 hour late-reg starting an hour apart.

That's okay for the non-majors. Not every tournament has to have thousands of players with gigantic paydays. That's what the majors are for.

Your comments about shortening the period before the bubble:

1. Don't pay more players. Enough already get paid and the prize pool is far too stretched out.
2. As has been mentioned in a few posts recently, the structure can afford to be sped up a little bit early while being slowed down in the middle stages.

You have painted yourself into a bit of a corner with adding guarantees to every tournament. Guarantees used to only exist on the major tournaments. By adding them to the smaller, "support" tournaments you have taken away the "special" from the guarantees, and when participation drops you get blasted for having to reduce the guarantees on tournaments that never had them before.

In my opinion, there are three categories of tournaments:
1. Major/Weekly tournaments: They occur once a week. The Sunday Million, Sunday Storm, Super Tuesday, and the other blue tournaments. These deserve large guarantees and large fields.
2. Daily Special tournaments: These occur once a day, and mainly include the BIG/HOT/Bounty Builder tournaments, and other little special tournaments. These also deserve large guarantees and large fields.
3. Schedule fillers: Also on the daily schedule, but with no special colour or brand. The truly vanilla tournaments with nothing special about them. They are typically smaller in field size and probably don't require any sort of guarantee. They are there for the players that want to play more tables, or something other than the monstrous daily/weekly major tournament.

Also, as a final point for this post, I don't think we are saying "limit late registration to one hour on every single tournament." The larger major tournaments (special Sunday tournaments, the largest blue majors, etc...) can use longer late registration. It is mainly the little filler tournaments that fall in to the third category that should especially be limited to no more than one hour of late registration.

agreed, how this isnt standard on all sites at this point is mind boggling.

That's the problem...as i've said before, the above MTT's aren't special anymore. They don't happen once a day like they used to. They have been diluted down to multiple versions of the same thing and guarantees suffer as result There's a big difference between being able to play a certain MTT 1x a day and 6x a day.

Don't see any problem, really. I think 6 big MTTs much better than just one. And I like new "Bigs". They are pretty good after tweaking.

pokerstars $5 deep stack min cash - $7.43
888 $5 deep stack min cash - $9.55
partypoker $5 the jab min cash - $10.14

I guess there's pro's and con's for looking at it both ways.

My main grumble centers around the prize pools and payouts. They used to be bigger and feel a little more worthwhile when there we're fewer 'Big's', than what they are now with multiple versions.

More MTT''s = good thing, Less $ = bad thing (in my opinion anyway).

Wrong, when the $215 was removed it had 24 players. That makes 20% over Gtd. How many times exactly did it have less than 20 entries?

Have you actually asked yourself why the FLO8 tournaments weren't performing very well overall? If you had, you would have realized that both the Daily and the Weekly were all starting outside the prime time hours (the same was true for the $215 PL/NLO8 btw).
Here is quote - which unfortunately has been ignored - to demonstrate what difference even a little time shift in ONE part of the world can make:
But instead of fixing what's wrong, you have blindly removed these tournaments. As In the case of FLO8 and ALL other individual mixed games you have officially killed the whole games.
Your alibi $55 Saturday tournaments with horrible structures and wimpy Gtd are a slap in the face to anyone having played these games before.

But players do. Just let it start Su 14:30(ET) make it re-entry, slap a 20K Gtd, make it part of Omania and have a test run for one month. I'll pay the overlay should there be any.

If Luke was Japanese he would/should have gutted himself by now

Just in case anyone plays satellites like those to the sunday million, a lot of the Poland players play these and help one another. They shove very wide when a lot of poland players left to act to put pressure on the nonpole. Look at how many poland players strangely enough play these. Either a lot of them play it or almost none. Basically they call all ins if it would be 1 poland player vs nonpole to make it 2 on 1 like they typically do. They mostly idenfity themselves to other poles by either using PL in their username or most importantly having the Poland flag. Obviously other players from other countries won't pay attention to this. And of course they do very similarly in the 180 mans which was the main format they do this on.


Poland players typically do not rebuy much like when playing 180 mans. Yet at these satellites, they have no issue rebuying over and over again since they know their other fellow poland players are doing the same. They will not eliminate one another unless absolutely necessary to not make it look obvious as they do lot of cover play.


A lot of other players who played these satellites have confirmed this as well. Care you comment on this pokerstars luke? This isn't going to get swept under the rug where when other players all know about this. Most of these players all know one another and speak to each other via skype and their polish poker forum. And if one of them doesn't know the other guy, then they eventually will know through a fellow friend.

Heh I meant to say the gtds are decently good and not bad...

Please run the BB109 the canabilazation is inevitable but should be ok still

+ 1 and + so much love for this post
Please listen to it Luke and thanks for your more frequent posts and answers.

Please definitely run both of those tournaments on Wednesday. There aren't enough mid-high stakes mtts to build our sessions around. Some of us can't supplement with other sites nor should we have to if there were an adequate number of tournies.

Whenever I start my session I fire up everything that is 33+ and barely hit 6 tables. Once I inevitably bust 2-3 of those in the first half hour, i am left with too few tables and no incentive to wait another few hours for the next slot of tournies to start. Way too few offerings and it's making playing any day unappealing.

I reduced from playing 4-5 times a week to barely twice. Pls at least make sure the bb 109 is there on Wednesdays. That would make Wednesday a must play because we could fire two fun tourneys with significant prize pools.

This cannibalisation argument is like the chicken and the egg scenario. The stars reps rely on it heavily and many regs that have logged considerable volume see it as completely blown out of proportion. The truth is its probably somewhere in between.

It's crazy how during any coop series the prizepools are regularly in the 100's of thousands where on a regular day we struggle to hit 15k guarantees sometimes. It's not just US players going to Canada or Mexico to play series that make them big. Nor is it the 800k emails sent out. It's the amount of high value, huge guarantee tournaments supplemented by a healthy regular mtt schedule.

I don't want to make direct comparisons here because I know they are a different animal but the demand is always there.

With fewer and fewer decent non-turbo tournaments to play, this trend may continue. Many regs don't post actively. A few I've spoken to are becoming live pros.

There are enough gimmick tournaments and I'm not even hating, I love prsko's. But what the schedule needs is more high value freezeouts with appealing first place prizes. Beef up the schedule with some regular speed 10-20k+ guarantees that add depth to a thin schedule.

Pls add more tournaments that have significant guarantees or no one is going to play them. A tournament doesn't start at a 5k guarantee and organically magically grow to 50k.

You as a site need to take risks on large guarantees that we will potentially add to our schedules. For example if I see a $82 prsko 5k gtd, it's the pits and not worth playing for a less than 1k 1st place prize. However if that same tourney is a 25k guarantee I never miss it. I know it's an extreme example but u get what I mean. It's the guarantee that decides the number of players not the other way around.

When we fire up a session it's based around there being many large tournaments to play. It's not based on one awesome 215 battle royale with smaller tournaments around it. Pls fix this and make the stars mtt schedule worth playing everyday so we don't have to all become withered live pros.


Cheers

Fwiw I love many of the new additions you have made to the schedule in the last few months. They are very encouraging. Would just like to put in more volume and given that stars offers the best product in the business, I am happy to solely play there. Also a lot of us have no access to other sites to supplement our schedule in these random Asian countries. But regardless, there is no site better to play on.

There should be mtt satties to all MM events and certainly the main event should have an abundance of satties in the regular scheduled satellite tab as well as a deadline satty.

I see that there is sng satties list, but never even glanced at it.

I'm playing every MM event I have time for, regardless (not rebuys except those .11c ones.)

But a lot of players are like me and don't give sng satties a glance, whereas mtt and deadline sats that are for games in a micro series will add thousands of extra players that won't/ can't otherwise play them.

Same here I will play all MM events were I have time for, but already filtered out ALL the rebuys for the obvious reasons!!
Schedule looks semi decent for European market and starting hours!
Dunno what the main consensus is, but I am not for the re-entry to the main event. That decision is anti micro grinder friendly in my opinion.
The statement that it is to guarantee the 1M prizepool is far fetched in my opinion.
Like aariestiger mentioned just run a whole lot of sats and surely deadline sat to make sure the garuantee is reached in normal fashion. Give out deposit bonus with a ticket like it was before...
This way you actually say he sorry we are afraid it will not reach the guarantee so we make it re-entry!
I mean c'mon this is THE main event of a series from the worlds leading poker site!
If you do not even believe in it how can you expect the customer base to do!!!???

+1

great idea!

+1

Make it something like $2.50 (or $3) 90 man PKO and they will run much better. Please make them PKO, not just KO like $1.50 90 man.

Luke, thanks for the last changes. You are starting to do a good job. Keep it up and keep posting frequently, there is still a lot of work.

Btw, 1.37x min cash in "Hots" is just terrible... Make them like a "Bigs" with at least 1.75x please.