This was so unsuccesful,that it had 16000 players
For the sake of a big guarantee,they should leave it as PKO

I play on Pokerstars India. They switched the Marquee Sunday Tournament to a PKO like 6 months after the network had launched. As a regional network we don't have that many runners but 5x re-entries. That is still better than unlimited re-entries offered by native operators and in-fact it is something we have to deal with on Stars (every tourney has 5-6 not a single FO in the entire MTT schedule which is very PKO and Turbo dense) otherwise all the players end up playing on those overnight operator sites that pay 6% of the field, allow re-entry till 6bb and unlimited of course (with the person with most re-entries getting an iphone etc lol) BUT imo when it comes to our regional network - Stars has been clever.

The Turbos play out sufficient hands and the stacks on the FT aren't too bad at all. They name them Deepstack Turbos and apart from having to play 600bb stacks with pure gambling idiots, it's not a bad structure.

Rest of the daily bigs turned into 6 max reg speed - couple are still 8 or 9 handed. On Sunday almost everything big apart from the 'Sunday Special' the said Marquee Sunday offering is non-pko 9 max and deep-structured.

They got rid of a tourney called Monsterstack - clearly the deepest structure available in India and I miss it. I crushed it.

The Sunday Special used to be lower GTD and lower variance. You'd see repeat winners quite a lot more often than you do now.

I won it, FT'd it three times. The PKO - I have had deep runs, 1 x 5th, 1 x 11th and couple more F2Ts. It does play deep but late reg in PKOs is kinda bad for roi....however, it is a net positive in terms of money flowing to recreational players.

Randoms win it, regs run deep but are losing money because math is hard. I think PKOs are universally the format where regs play worse than they do in a non-pko. Obv 5 re-entries mean 6 times over - and then it doesn't matter if it is a reg or a fish, the odds are that one of those stacks will go on a heater.

I don't mind the change in the format, it does bring variance but you got to run good to win any tourney and when you run good in this one, it pays well up-top. I just hate the 5-6 re-entries across the board. The extra variance in the PKO format comes from the villains meta-gaming for bounties even into the FT not realizing the most important one is the HU bounty and to get HU, you essentially need to stick to +cEV and forget the extra 'deemed' equity that makes a spot barely +cEV. Yea, poker is a quantitative game where mdfs are governed by a combination of sizing + ranges and PKOs change that but just play solid, clean poker, you will make money.

I don't think the difference between PKO and non-PKO tournies is more than 1% in terms of overall strategy. If one format brings in more recs and spreads the liquidity a little bit, the better for all of us. Winners will still win, yo.

The good thing is that any series, at least we are keeping some solid structures. FT'd Winter Series Main (was a non-pko) and 13th in the SCOOP Main (phase tourney, deep structure) and today starts Micro Millions and the schedule looks awesome. They added some micros but since fields here are spoiled for GTDs, it is essentially the regular schedule with more big games per day, bigger GTDs and for the first time - a series specific TLB.

Huge difference between .IN and .COM but I've heard Stars is about to doomswitch almost every week for the past 12-13 years.

Seems healthy as ever to me. What is the word for having Hypochondria for someone else?

Fear.

Too bad I am going to Ireland and then Belfast for a wedding.

I still think re-entries in MTTs are far worse of an Idea than PKO. Beats the principle idea behind a tournament but then again, adds to the prize pool, another important feature of MTTs.

In the end, be it a pko, multi-entry or FO - if you bink the big one and someone asks you, how did you do it? Your answer better have the phrase 'I won a tournament man, I ran pretty facking good.'