This is a freezeout tournament. Last man standing wins. It isn't a test of 'NLHE full ring' as you seem to think, it's a test of NLHE.

I do have an intriguing solution to your problem though... Picture this.

Everyone is assigned a table (of course) at the start of the tourney. That table can not be touched until there are 5 players left, when that group of 5 will be sent to another table that has 5 players left, thus recreating the 10-man 'full ring' table. Lather, rinse, repeat, then proceed w/ final table as normal. We can call it the DoN MTT ME.

All that being said, that should be it's own tourney format, don't touch the ME, it's fine the way it is.

Besides, in the first 30 years of the tourney, the no. of entrants never exceeded 400. This 'having to play for 7, 8, 9 days' is a relatively new dilemma, and again, last man standing wins. That will always be the rule.

As hard as it sounds, my plan is to avoid all possible sources of poker information from the start of the FT until ESPN's broadcast. I feel like since the ME is delayed 3 months to make it "live", then knowing the results before the broadcast is a just a waste of a good opportunity.

Will anyone else be doing this or am I the only one?

I'm not even going to try. It would just be absolutely impossible.

Not me, I'll be working that day so ill be checking up on it in my free time at work all day.

I will go down to the Rio and watch some of it live. I'll probably follow it late night online and then avoid knowing who wins the heads up match on Monday so that there is still some anticipation watching it on TV.

Lol, thanks mods.

From sunday no more 2+2 or anything poker related, also blocking the chat from poker clients.

How exactly do you do this? I can't seem to find an option on 'Stars to turn off banners and to not have the Pokerstars news from popping up?

Actually, I just found out how to turn off the banners. But is there a way to get it so the news doesn't periodically pop up