@Luke



Thanks for the feedback. I agree on the idea of a heads-up during peak time, but I think we are reaching critical mass in terms of how much Zoom the schedule can support. I'd like to give this some more thought..


For us europeans its almost impossible to play them since they start at 0:30 CET ($ 11), 3:35 CET ($ 3.30), 5:15 CET ($ 33), 10:40 CET ($ 16.50).
The $ 22 Saturdays Duel at 19:15 CET would basically the perfect HU Zoom tournament for being a daily tournament. It has the right buy-in and a timeslot where no other zoom tournament is. Another timeslot could be 13:00 CET to add a $ 5.50 zoom HU MTT.

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1 - Why? Anyone else agree/disagree?

2 - I don't think finishing second in this tournament and not winning a prize is particularly common as you'd have to win your round of four against someone who also got to that point without winning a prize, but I take your point. The problem is that we don't want to create situations in this format where players are incentivized to stall. What would you think about a prize structure where a certain percent of players just receive 2x or 3x their buy-in, regardless of their finishing position?

3 - This tournament seems to be well-participated. What do you like about it?

1. 5 Card Draw tournaments from 8 minutes to at least 12


Ive played a lot of them back in the days with 15 minutes and I played a bunch with 8 minutes and the main problem with 5 Card Draw is that you cant just go all-in if you dont have a good hand, because the weaker hand pre-draw doesnt have a high enough chance to make a profitable shove with stacks above 2 big blinds. Which leads to the szenario that you get blinded down a lot of the times and then you have to go all in with ~1-2bb left with mostly the weaker hand. So what I am basically saying is that a fast structure doesnt leave much room for an edge in a draw game where hand selection is the main & key (much more than in other variants) and if you dont have enough time to do a hand selection it basically becomes gambling especially when it comes to the final table bubble and tables are played with 3-4 people.

This game is just so much better with a slower structure. You have time to make notes and prepare strategies against your opponets and build urself an image by for example making a bad call here and there in small pots to get more value in big pots etc. I also have to say that PSKO is bad for this game. Basically the player who gets the best pre-draw hand gets the bounty most of the time. It doesnt really add much too the game, I even think that it makes those tournaments less attractive when people see that there is only $ 40-55 $ for first place instead of like $ 80-100.

Imo you should definetly try to make a test run with an old format 12 or 15 minutes PL 5 Card Draw (non PSKO) and compare their performance.


2. The tournaments are great, but the variance is extremely high when it comes to payouts for the first few places.
I think the best idea is to start regular play at an earlier stage instead of top 4. Lets say top 16 or 32 (depending on the participation) continues as a normal HU PSKO event where play continues when only 8 people are left etc. this would guarantee that the top 8-top 16 players get a price. On top of that I like the idea which was mentioned earlier to pay the top 5 % with ~2-3x Buy-In combined with the earlier (top16-top32) normal play.


3. Rebuy Zoom MTTs.
Ive played a lot of them back on FullTilt already and it was a great format and a very nice player experience because those tournaments combined (low buy-in + great price pool + low run time) which is the best combination especially for casual players who want to win a lot and dont want to invest much time.

I think the structure should be a bit deeper than the 1 $ R is right now 7-8 minute blinds and 10-12 minute blind levels during normal play.

Imo a $ 3.30 Rebuy Zoom at 13 CET with 8 min blind levels would fit perfect. Or replaces the $ 11 9max Zoom at 14:30 for it.

But I would also like to see a rebuy zoom later on the day between 17:00 CET - 21:00 CET maybe as a replaces for the $ 1.10 or $ 3.30 zoom.

I see a very high potential for them. Those rebuy zoom MTTs had a very good participation back in the good days of FullTilt.
Id also like to see a rebuy psko zoom somewhere in the future.



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Late registration in this tournament will be reduced from 80 minutes to 60 minutes going forward. It should solve the issue. Thank you very much for the feedback - these types of issues are difficult to spot without your help.


Thanks!


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I'm not a fan of the first two options. I'm not sure how happy players would be with a slower structure in a Zoom tournament and bigger starting stacks are mostly reserved for special tournaments. I don't think a shorter registration period will hurt this tournament in particular. Players can change their registration habits and there's no re-entry.

Seems like you were right.


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Thank you for this. It is a pretty crappy player experience to have these listed, so I'm going to see what can be done to have them removed. In the meantime, I've expired yours so they should no longer be in your menu.

Yes it was annoying to see them for so many years there. Thanks for removing them.

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I understand this could be problematic in a tournament where you only win money if you knock someone out, but in a normal tournament, this would massively incentivize stalling. This is a roundabout way of saying that the price of development would simply be too high for such a niche case.

Alright, totally understandable.



Thanks for taking the time Luke & keep it up!

I will echo the heads up suggestion, I don't really get why there's not more of them, they are niche tournies, so I doubt that it would cut into normal tournaments, if anything it would encourage people who don't play at that time to find the time. It's also a bit annoying that despite it being a successful format, there are very few of them meanwhile people that play PKOs, 6m, 9m even PLO have a ton of options throughout the day.

I really do wish they would do HU tourny in that time slot as well (an hour before or after is fine too), just replicating the Saturday HU $22 with the same structure would be excellent. In my ideal world you would have these tournies be hourly or at least bihourly with 1-2 buyin sizes, or at least every 3-4 hours during down time.

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Gonna disagree here, to me they are extremely low variance, I think people just don't know how wide they have to hunt bounties and that's a part of the element of skill in the same way knowing ICM adds a layer of skill. Out of probably 200 of these types of tournaments, I've had one time where I was in the top 14% and I didn't get a single bounty meaning that it will happen, but I've never had anything close to top 10% with no bounties. Chances are that if someone has this issue, they are not hunting bounties nearly wide enough in either calling or shoving themselves. Again, this is a skill factor that people are doing things wrong, in the same way people could have issues if they just play regular call off ranges on the final table.

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Personally I do enjoy these as well, specifically the 9 max PKO and they are a lot shorter than a lot of the other similar tournaments which usually go 6+ hours whereas these go 4-5 hours. 8 minutes unless it is a relatively shallow pool (sub 500 players) would go pretty long though if it eclipses 1k+ registrations. I wouldn't mind "deep" style structures as long as it's up front that 8 minutes act as "slow" tournaments in effect. I wish they had more of these in the larger buyins where you basically have the option to play the early ones at 10-11AM ET or the $2, $22, $215 at 4:45 PM ET and that's it. Def needs more specifically in the $15-50 range.

I don't get why there can't be more added, do players really need an endless stream of regular tournaments but for those of us that love the Zooms we get like 4-5 a day that we really like? Like cmon, changing things around or adding a few more would hardly hurt Stars or the regular player pool, if anything they should just start them as low buyin guarantees (2-300 people which Stars can hit on just about anything) and just appease us.

This doesn't change current dynamics, it expands a market and it makes quite a few of us that love this niche VERY happy, so nobody loses, there is market innovation for Stars and there are people that absolutely love the change.

stars lagging and causing timeouts , party/888 are fine

Same here. Got disconnected and can't login.

I totally agree with bringing back more HU mtt's.
The 16.50 in the morning is always doing very well and hitting it's guarantee.
Zoom/Total KO are definitely not musts in my opinion, however more important to have a great HU MTT of the day in the evening (European). I would suggest a 22$ HU Super KO with a top heavy pay out.

Additional; a 11$ HU tournament every two hours would make me really happy.

I don't play any $16.50 tournaments or lower since the rake increase... it would be nice to have one or two $22 games for peak time UK players; maybe a $22 Turbo PKO game between 7.30-10.30 UK time

You misunderstood me a bit. I am not talking about the "profit variance", I am talking about the payout variance between 1st place and 2nd, 3rd, etc. Its much more healthy if 1st place gets a bit less money and ~2nd to 8th get a bit more. I have seen tournaments where 1st got 10x more money than 2nd. Of course you can argue that those people who got so much less money were probably playing it wrong. But even if you are a good player and you finish 2nd then 1st place still gets 3-5 times more money than 2nd.

A good solution to solve this case would be to start regular play earlier than top 4 + a flat payout structrue for ~Top 5 finishers.
Ive talked to a bunch of players on skype and for most of them the main barrier for not playing them is that 1st place gets too much of the cake compared to other high finish places.

Ive made a short calculation for my suggestion based on the $ 11 HU Zoom tournament which usually has around 1000 entrys.

Entrys: 1000
Pricepool: $ 10k
Payouts: Top 5 % (Top 50) get 2 Buy-Ins

So 50 x 2 x $ 10 = $ 1000 (10 % of the overall pricepool would be the normal payout structure)

Paying 5 % of the field 2 Buy-Ins each would make it a 90 % PSKO.
Paying 10 % - 2 Buy-Ins each = 80 % PSKO
Paying 5 % - 3 Buy-Ins each = 85 % PSKO
Paying 10 % - 3 Buy-Ins each = 75 % PSKO


I belive that top 5 % seems to be the best since top 10 % would be too close to itm at the end of late registration.

As a weekly second place finisher, I can't argue with that. Paying the upper 2-5% would be a nice addition if done right.

I know its a World Cup Sunday but $175K GTD in the Storm...........

Luke, there needs to be a confirmation message that a deal is done. As it is people are unsure if the deal they agreed to has gone through or not until the game is over.

Not 1 post about common cents today. I guess no one really cares.

Also lol at people defending the series. They have had much better series and it has not resulted in numbers increasing on the site at all. The vast majority of new players dont play games over $5 or low stakes cash anyway. The days of random fish jumping straight on to mid stakes mtts/cash are long gone.

Good point. I had the same issue when I first made a deal with the new system.


I am not really a big fan of it since its not possible to make custom deals like before.

On top of that I dont like that the chat function is turned off during a deal. Ive already had deals which were cancelled because someone wasnt 100 % sure how a deal works and therefore cancelled it because the person was afraid of making a mistake and losing money. (yes a lot of those people exist)

I prefered the deal making system on full tilt where it was possible to make chip chop, icm and custom deals & chat to explain it to others who never used it.

While making a deal there should always be some room for discussions.


Its world cup + holidays + wsop.

I am looking for a regular weekly tournament on pokerstars with buyin less than 20 dollars. I dont mind re-entry tournaments but I dont want to play a rebuy. I am from the UK and a start time around 7-8pm would be ideal.

I want something with starting stack of 10,000 chips but reasonable time to completion like a turbo and 4-6 hours if I go all the way.

Suggestions anyone?

I have looked at a lot of the Sunday tournaments (like storm or warmup) I can afford but they take a much longer time.

Prob not if your looking for a rebuy.

If your not concerned about rebuy play the $22 Bubble rushes. I don't play them, I think they have re-entry but shouldn't last more then 6 hours most of the time.

Play party poker turbos thst Start at 15 past the hour

So 7-8pm startign time and 4-6 hours runtime you want (ends at 11pm-2am) . around 22$ Reg or Turbo, no rebuy. Deep if possible..

888:
33$ Big Fish, 15k gtd @ 16:30 - Late Reg ends at 19:50 - 5k stacks, 15m blinds, ends @ 03:30
12$ Deepstack Catfish - 5k$ @ 17:00 - Late Reg ends at 20:20 - 5k stacks, 15m blinds, ends @ 02:28
55$ Monsoon, 10k gtd @ 18:30 - Late Reg ends at 21:50 - 5k stacks, 15m blinds, ends @ 00:54 - 888 got a lot of 5$ to 55$ sats as well as direct sats, so def playable.
12$ 1k$ Turbo Deep @ 18:30 - Late Reg ends 19:45 - 5k stacks, 6m blinds, ends @ 22-23 (no record)

Stars:

Big 22 - 40k$ - 10m blinds - 5k stacks - starts @ 18:00 and late reg ends at 20:00 - game ends at 02:50
Hot 11$ - 30k$ - 5m blinds - 5k sacks - starts @ 18:15, Late Reg ends 19:15 - game ends at 23:16
Hot 55$ - 35k$ - 5m bl - 5k st - start 19:00, LR ends 20:00 - game ends 23:40



gotta love smaller fields, when you want to get in bed before 6 am...

^ Accept on Party Poker where small fields still last over 8 hours

Yeah accept that.

is this a thing now?

What about micro millions in the end of july or beggining of august ?And please make some leaderboard for it with cash or tickets but not 30 k tickets only for first ....

Thanks very much, I think the hot $11 is a good option to be honest... even if I end up late regging for it half the time.

Thanks everyone else for their suggestions too.

Luke many players in this threat said that they like ( me also) to add low stake PKO blue tourney ,there was even proposition for name ( 7.5 sunday battlefield ) for example it is good it can be something like 6.66(6+0.66) with 66 guaranteed and 1-re entry possible to make the guarantee to hit allways .Also have proposition for blue tourney Daily mini hyper 4.4$ or 3.3$ with 1 re-entry 10 or k guaranteed or something like that since hypers are likeable and theres nothing except saturday spider ...

Can we get a gtd increase in the 14.15 ET 3x- Turbo? We had 60k, 40k for years. 2,5k right now is just taking the piss. Make it 3k and 5k on sundays at least?

^

You still want to play that? After they raked the rebuys and increased rake by 20% recently? Have some respect for yourself and your money man

Same with 3x-turbo sattys, to SM and other. I wonder if they are satisfied now, how they killed those satellites. Flagship Sunday Half-million soon Luke?

that's true. I played it daily years ago and now maybe once a month.