Pardon me for passing over or atleast skimming over most of the prior comments. Regardless or not whether late registering at a certain time increases equity or not I think one thing that should be included in this equation is that earlier entrants should be rewarded more so for doing such. Maybe that will put the scale back in balance?

Regardless, it's ridiculous not to reward the people that get in early and drive the tourney towards it's guarantee. I know some sites that do add bubble protection, etc but it's probably not even enough. Just take a look sometime at the number that starts the tourney and it's obvious that this number is often much lower than the guarantee. Usually less than 20% of the guarantee in most cases. That is just ridiculous.

In smaller local live tournaments they sometimes give an early bird bonus of an extra 10-25% chips to people who register on time. GG give their online players bubble protection for doing so. Not sure why this has not been embraced and expanded for the bigger tourneys.

I would guess that bubble protection changes the strategic calculus of the bubble.

Imagine being one away from the money in the Small Blind against a person benefiting from bubble protection. Your shoving range would be narrower if you knew he's not afraid to bust out!

Extra chips for registering early sounds better.

Couple comments
1. In MOST situations, I don't think I'm making more $/game max LRing w/e BI online MTT compared to playing it from the beginning. I DO however do this at times as I focus heavily on my hourly wage and max LR gives you the highest hourly in most situations
2. Is the beauty of PKO MTTs....quickly becomes very poor EV (and losing $/game EV) to late reg PKOs as if you last minute late reg for example, a very large portion of the prizepool is already gone
3. ICM model vs FGS model will be very different. In a lot of situations, having a large stack is worth more than what an ICM calc will spit out and therefore also overvalues short stacks

I think Late Reg might also reduce overall skill in the tournament for all players involved. If you have a bunch of stacks late regging then you are reducing NLHE to more of a two street or even one street game approaching the bubble.

No idea how difficult it would be to administer in a live setting, but cutting off new entries at 2-3 hours and still having re-entries for the normal(crazy long) amount of time would be infinitely better than the current system.

Agree, that is another reason why people who claim certain people should have a massive mark up are living in a dream world.

The edges are just not there but the variance certainly is.

this is reminding me of the first SnG strategy I remember reading about. I feel like Chris Ferguson either figured it out or wrote about it first although I could be wrong. I think SnG's paid 2 spots (maybe 3). The strategy was to fold everything except Aces (maybe Kings) and basically blind off. People would bust each other and you would get to 3 handed with a short stack (or maybe 4 handed, if 3 paid). At that point you were one away from the money with not many chips and you needed to play hands now.

The math behind it was even though you were at a big chip disadvantage, you would get lucky and cash enough that it was a solid strategy.

although it's not the same as late registering, it kinda works off the same concept.

This is basically how double or nothings work

thats a good point. if you want to play cash during the early levels and max late reg the mtt that would prob give you the highest $ expectation; but what is an example of a situation where your roi would actually increase by late regging?

If your deep stack game sucks but your short stack game is phenomenal ie Phil Hellmuth.

Not sure if serious, Hellmuth is renowned for making enormous short stacked errors

Kind of similar to optimal strategy in double or nothing sngs. In the 1st 3 or 4 levels, it makes very little sense to play hands like AJ, AQ, KQ, pairs lower than Queens. Their value is so much lower than their value in regular tourneys. Then again, as long as there is no cheating in double or nothings(which unfortunately there has been a lot of over the years) the best in the world, has probably less a 5% advantageof someone who studied the game for an hour.

I think some of the few situations would be in the extreme cases where you last min late reg and you're basically right there on the bubble. I've noticed this happens in some PLO events as well as people bust really at a more rapid rate and players continue to bust quickly on the bubble whereas NLHE events sometimes really start to lull once you get on the bubble itself, esp at the higher stakes.

But yea, honestly, most players in most situations who are last min LRing events are doing so for their hourly expectation more so than thinking they have a higher ROI (at least in terms of the players I talk to). Or they are at least approaching it more from that perspective in terms of thinking about efficiency and what table/s are worth their time and when and etc

Of course I'm serious. Everyone makes mistakes but overall Hellmuth's shortstack game is tremendously strong.

IMHO, his short stack game is lacking.

"Tremendously strong" - lmao

his marketing is "tremendously strong". He pulled a big one over you!

during the boom i once registered to a 50 dollar 10 person sit and go on pacific poker, it didn't fill for a while and i forgot about it and went shopping. when i got home i discovered there were 4 people left and i was the 3rd stack. i finished second.
after that i'd register for sit and goes and not even play them for a while if i was busy doing something else.

this wouldn't work today, but back then people would just get all in pre in the first level with garbage all the time.

This.

The highest $EV per game for the majority of players is almost always going to be registering at the start if the field is a typical 8+ handed "MTT field."

Not only in PSKOs is a majority of the prize pool gone when you late reg, you come in at stacksize that covers almost no one so the majority of the bounty prize pool isn't in play for you until you cover some players and those players will tend to have smaller bounties. Compared to registering at the beginning late regging PSKOs is a huge mistake and max late regging them is the most -EV decision you can make in regards to what games you play and what time that you register them.

ICM is wildly inaccurate for how games actually play out in many situations, especially in non-NLH games.

WPN bot operators know this theory to be 100% true.

(No, I don't have bot derangement syndrome. I recall someone compiling data in which known WPN bots always late register.)

In live cardrooms, late registration can also exist because they don't have enough tables for all the players who want to play. I've registered for tournaments before they start, just to have to wait 2 hours to play. Maybe the short staffed card room did me a favor.

That's a somewhat different situation that surely happens fairly rarely live and never online

I assume all this is only true for non-bounty freeze out tournaments?

I think I’ve been convinced by this thread to start registering late. I was always of the mindset that you’re missing out on dead money by doing so but the math seems sound.

Is the proper late reg strat to do it as late as possible or are there bb level to starting stack ratios to consider and such?

What about the fact that the "Late Reg Tournament Product" being offered is being devalued? In sales they say this:

33% of prospects will say yes
33% of prospects will say no
33% of prospects will say maybe

The goal is to convert the maybes to yes's. In regards to poker tournaments, assuming we as players are the ones "selling" the product, meaning promoting the game to get new players in, how do we convert the 33% of "maybe" customers to a yes?

Offering a product like late registration with 10 big blinds or less, will leave a majority of the "maybes" with a product they won't like. They'll bust quickly and get little time to actually play the tournament, or even when they double up, they'll still be at a huge disadvantage to the other players who have built a stack.

Also, word of mouth is huge. Referrals are a big part of a business's longevity. How many people are going to tell their friends to play tournaments and late reg? How many would recommend that they purchase the same product that they themselves purchased? 1 happy customer tells 5 people. 1 angry customer tells EVERYONE. Without training on short stack poker. and even with training, these players stand very little chance. It may benefit the players who are good, or who enter early by having "bigger prize pools", but for how long?

If human beings are offered a shortcut, they will take it. Almost every time. If you build a highway to my work that saves me 15 minutes, I will probably never take the back roads again. If we offer a product where players can just enter, tank, and then possibly be in the money, how long before nobody registers early?

I'm looking at the ACR 40k $55 special right now, and there's 177 people registered just 4 levels in. The guarantee assumes 800 people will enter. Less than 20% of the field has entered 1 hour into the tournament.

Everything in the world is moving faster and faster. Tik Tok, Amazing 2 day shipping, Coinbase instant cashouts. Yet poker seems to be getting slower and slower. The game I loved is moving in the opposite frequency of everything else in the world. Seemingly to benefit only the few people who have all the time in the world to play. How do we get young people to play poker, when it's taking longer and longer to actually "play poker"?

Back to the sales aspect, the "yes" customers will be playing regardless of late reg, and they know what they are in for. It's more of a gamble but again, they know what they are in for. The "no" customers won't be playing regardless, whether it's because they don't gamble, or for whatever reason they decided to say no in the first place.

But the "maybe" customers, are now being offered a product that we can all agree is going to have less value to them in the long run. A novice player entering late, stands minimal chance of actually being successful. As poker players wanting to get the game bigger and bigger, it's up to us to create an enjoyable environment that people want to play in. What are we really offering them? How many times are these "maybe" customers buying the late reg product, and then losing or getting very little enjoyment, or value, out of the product they purchased?

Trust and Urgency are 2 main points to a sale. People have been losing trust in online sites because of cheating and bots for the most part. Now, they don't even have the urgency to play. One other main ingredient of sales is TIME. If you don't have a prospects time, then you can basically just shut up and leave. We are losing trust, losing urgency, and not respecting that people don't have the time to do things like they used to. Long term the product being offered is doomed.

And for the ones that say bigger prize pools, more money to first... Are we really going to change the game to make the top .1% happier in the long run?

Rarely? It happens daily at the Venetian. Sometimes they have 400 people on the alternate list waiting to play.

Sites have been trying to find ways to speed up tournaments while keeping guarantees high. Stars tried bubble rush years ago which was basically a tournament that started as a hyper and as you got to the later stages it slowed down. GGpoker has flip and Gos where you flip until you are at the final table. Pokersites still offer multiple hyper and turbo style tourneys which are all still very popular will all types of players. They even run weekly phase tournaments now where players can enter a mulitple of day ones during the week, which generally last three to four hours tops, and give the player the chance to move onto a weekend Day2 with a very high guarantee.

Most players want the bigger prize pools. I think pokersites are doing their best. Lottery formats are still super profitable. The sites offer what they offer and people choose what they want to play. If anything aside from advertising and attracting players, sites would benefit more from multiple smaller guarantee tournaments as large guarantees end up producing bigger winners and more money gets withdrawn off the site from the players that win big in those tourneys.