Played in a local live $20,000 guarantee tournament with $12,000 starting chips for $110 buy-in. Re-entry for the first 5 rounds. 20 Min rounds.

From the 5th round until I busted out, about 6 hours later, in 22nd (just made the money by 3) there was never, at any table I played at, a "HUGE" stack. There was always 5-7 players who were around 6-9BB and 2-3 with maybe 10-15. Nobody EVER had 20+BB.

Either, every single player was nearly equal in ability, the poker gods decided to have some fun, OR the structure was such that it ended up this way.

Shouldn't every table, after 2-3 hours, have 1 or 2 <6BB, 1 or 2 >6<10BB, 1 or 2 >10<20BB and one or two HUGE stacks?

Is there any way to determine from the tournament blinds structure what you can expect to see at the table? Obviously in a "Turbo" online tournament, you almost always see tons of small stacks and tons of ridiculously large stacks from the frequent all-ins early. But in the "Deep Stack" tournaments (online) that start with around $5000, you see a more "normal" distribution of stack sizes.

Was it odd that every table seemed to have 70% of the players in "all-in" or nothing situations with <9BB? Or is this just normal?

20min is short for live, where you have 3x less hands than online (takes longer to shuffle, deal and usually there are more flops).
So effectively this plays like a turbo.
It depends on the structure but live turbo like this are usually almost playing like a hyper turbo because the blinds increase so fast : go from 1200 to 1600 to 2k to 3k etc so it's tough to stay >20bb for very long unless you run good

Pretty sure this was the structure.
http://www.commercecasino.com/wp-con...SPC_16_NLH.pdf

So do you think the fact that after round 5, there was never really a time when 70% of the table didn't feel like it was all-in or nothing, was due to the structure?