I see your point regarding the real Ironman.

Regarding Main Event, Ironman is over in two days max, rather than 8 days and 3 months. Also it is a completely different skill set. It mimics the deep cash game structure that is a badge of honor among a certain set of poker players. For example, in the Macau Big Game, playing 24 hours is somewhat standard and 48 not unusual. I hear there is an informal rule you can't leave the table unless you are down $10 mil or have played 12 hours straight.

I probably don't need to say it, but having enforced 12 hour breaks in between tournament days is completely diff from playing one session.

Limits on late reg makes perfect sense in an endurance poker setting. In fact, given that naps are allowed (and encouraged, for health reasons) a late reg limit of say 2 hours would make perfect sense. That way you accommodate players who got stuck in traffic or woke up late. This trend of extending late reg almost all the way through Day 1 at WSOP seems a little ridiculous.

You don't need to start 4k bb deep, if you want you can start with 25-50 blinds and only 10k stacks. If you are hoping to go 50 hours and expecting 100 entrants then you set the level intervals so that you reach the final level (maybe 15000-30000) in 50 hours time. So that means blinds doubling on average every nine hours so it should play reasonably deep all the way through instead of the usual deepstack structure which is just a turbo with a level 0, level -1, level -2 etc added to the front of the structure.

I think you would not easily exceed 24 hours with 100 hundred entrants. LAPC already does a 15k version, not what their level/blind structure is. They max out at 24 hrs.

I would say to make this a true endurance event, 40k chips would be minimum and a 25-25, 1 hour structure. This is less than half of the stacks and a less sick level structure than what we had at the APT Manila. But it makes more sense to me as a sustainable format.

Funny story, Laak was the first guy I mentioned the Ironman event idea to at WSOP. He says to me "I wish you the best of luck in your endeavor but I will never play more than 20 hours straight again in my life."

OP is annoyingly delusional.

No one forcing you to read man, or even bump up the thread to say that.

One man's persistence is another man's annoyance. But I tell you, most people live life in a rut.

Threads best forgotten quickly disappear on this forum. The ideas I presented must have some merit, or present concepts in a way that is worth thinking about.

Damn. I just hung out with Martin Cruz Smith tonight, talked writing. Ok, I'll shut up or be accused of a sick brag.

confirmed best mtt to judge skill

That's how they choose to organise it. If they doubled the duration of each level then they would (near to) double the total length of the tournament. They would still be playing deep through the second half of the tournament though as the bust outs would be more evenly spread through the whole tournament. I would much prefer that to making it last longer by having what should really be termed pre-levels where the blinds equate to 18 cent / 18 cent in ICM terms, which others ITT have pointed out you could simply sleep through and having the bustouts come faster later on with a lower BB average stack.

Can I ask, in the tournament you played, what was the average stack size in BBs when you got down to 5 handed?

And sorry if I sound argumentative. I like the idea and that's why I want to contribute what I think I understand to the discussion to help get things right.

The thread had disappeared for 4 months until you bumped it again.


lol dude you think you're some type of poker ambassador now because you won a tournament that nobody even knew about until you started posting. You have the balls to say that because you won some weird structured tournament it's the best judge of skill of any type of tournament.

I bumped the thread after a lot of subsequent thought, based on the earlier posts in this thread, a lot of which were similar to yours, and my own observations at WSOP.

I've never made any bones about being an amateur at poker (a game which can always use a few ambassadors). But I see your viewpoint, there is some truth to it. I have tried to qualify my original (admittedly ridiculous) statement by saying that to me Ironman is the best judge of "deep structured, endurance" tournament poker. I have qualified this statement further by saying the structure we had in place in Manila was too deep. But I respect deepness, as that is inherently part of what makes this type of event more than a gimmick and something worth bragging about.

Ironman as a term may be problematic, cause there are a number of variations, some which are quite shallow.

Lektor, I'm going to have to go back through the photos published and prob contact APT to determine average stack size with five left. But it was well over 100 big blinds, probably in the 300-500 range. At some point, the blinds are so small that they don't even come into play. At that point, you are essentially playing a cash game within a tournament structure.

I am hoping for the worlds shortest poker tournament.

25 chips and blinds are 25-25.

So if the stacks were that deep then it was probably the endurance aspect eliminating people as much as the force of the blinds increasing. Maybe the structure you propose is better then.