Originally Posted by jdpc27
One of the biggest issues I see in this thread is we keep referring to whats good for regs vs recs, and making that a big part of the debate. I think it makes us lose sight of what really is the current state of the HS tournament scene and where it is going. First, I want to state that I think the reg vs rec arguement is silly. In fact, I think nowadays the "recs" and the "regs" interests are more aligned then ever.
I would have bought the arguement that in an earlier ecosystem, we had a bunch of true recreational players firing mtts. However, in todays ecosystem, this is simply not the case, at least in the midstakes and highstakes arena. Spin n go's and other stars directives and incentives have pulled most of the true recreational players that are left out of the tournament ecosystem. What we are left with is some pro's and a bunch of players that don't play professionally, but have dreams of hitting it big like they've seen their idols and peers do. These players are not true recreational players perse. They may not have the same win rates as the top players in the game, but they know how to at least spell poker and know how to scan a lobby looking for the best value on the schedule. This player and a reg's goals are mostly in alignment and we want the same things. We also fire up similiar tournaments for similiar reasons. We are way more the same then we are different in these respects. Anyone thinking that players rec or reg don't care about rake, format of tournament, prizepools and are just firing away is really just living in the past imo. those days have passed us by unfortunately as spin n go's aren't going away and the crack that they have introduced those guys too is very hard to combat. Trying to get a guy used to playing 3 handed for 6 minutes to get back to playing for an hour to 5 hours? good luck with that one.
So with that said, I think we need to look at tournaments as the following. low stakes is a category by itself. High Stakes should be a category by itself. and midstakes should have its feet in both to some degree. Currently managing them as one cohesive whole is a mistake imo. I almost never fire a low stakes offering no matter what ridiculous promotion you put on it. I could care less if you've added 25 bounty builders below 15 dollars or if you got rid of all of them. What happens is you guys manage this as a whole and then look at number of tournaments across all 3 thinking you have enough tournaments on the schedule but not realizing the huge holes that exist at highstakes.
Many times while playing live this year, I've had people bring up my posts here on 2p2. While not everyone agrees with all of my views, the comments are always the same. I would play more on Tuesdays and Thursday's if there were more offerings. Not one single person said to me, "you know what, I think tuesday is just fine as it is". One metric I don't think stars uses but should is consumer engagement time. Its a key metric used by most startups that are technology or app based. Basically it refers to how much time the consumer spends engaged daily with that app. The belief is that the longer they can keep the consumer engaged, the more likely it is that the consumer will become entrenched in the app and loyal to that company, almost dependant on it as a resource which leads to much higher long term revenue gains but gives up some short term ones. Facebook recognized this early on and realized that many people would leave facebook to go view people's links about funny videos and crazy videos so they quickly adapted their software to allow those links within facebook even though they knew it would slow everything way down and require them to make huge additional investements in servers and storage space without seeing them get a tangible dollar benefit on paper. Yet, they quickly made these changes and took the "hit" lmfao because they realized it would almost double the amount of time each user spent on facebook daily, and that additional time would allow them to serve up more ads, learn even more about their customer than everyone allowing them to sell their targeted advertising for even more dollars. It would lead to the consumer becoming almost dependant on facebook and turning to it just as often as they would the news and maybe even more to know what was going on in the world. In the end, these changes made them way more money then even they anticipated.
In the case of stars, i don't think you guys understand how to measure and benefit from customer engagement time. let me make this clear...on Tuesdays, I wipe my schedule clean. I plan to play on pokerstars. I fire up a schedule that only slightly motivates me but is enough to keep me logging in. As super tuesday launches and I build a stack, i get more excited and start looking for additional tournaments to load up even if they are ones I don't typically fire as I expect to be engaged on stars for the next several hours. The moment that I lose the flip and am out of the super tuesday, the excitement immediately runs out of the room. The rest of the schedule directly before and after the super tuesday is ordinary and meh...its basically risking like 4-6k to cash for a potential 5-12k if everything goes well, basically risking 4-6k to win 3-6k. Not very enticing options for a recreational or a reg. So, i stop registering rest of the day as no need to tie myself up for an additional 5 hours trying to win 2-3k if i win some small side tournament and i have to win when i'm already down 3k on the session. and depending on what i'm in, maybe i unreg some things i'm already regged for.
Now, lets talk about the elephant in the room. When you got a poker addict, a guy who spends 10 of 12 months on the road playing poker, when you have him clicking unregister and quitting a session that he has cleared his entire schedule for the day for, then you have big problems. You are losing out on several hours of additional engagement time that i am begging you to take, yet you seem to be oblivious to the dollars I am waving at you. While I would like to think that i'm unique or special, most I have talked to have echoed similiar sentiments. That they would rather go out for a drink with their mates or watch a show or sporting event than bang heads for small wins playing late into a tuesday or thursday unless they are still in super or thrill. You guys look at the super tuesday or thrill as the culmination of the day, and i'm suggesting it should be the crown jewel among a forest of tournaments. If you make it the entire buildup of the day, then there is nothing left once that tournament is gone.
So, if we really want to be honest and make some fixes, we have to admit that tuesdays and thursdays are broken. They are not sustainable longterm. They will continue to wither until they die unless some changes are made. My suggestions are as follows:
For tuesdays:
320 Super Tuesday Second Chance 300k GTD
same structure as super tuesday
50 dollar rebuy with big gtd..not sure what is actually realistic here, but would love to see 80-100k gtd. can make it escalating blinds thru rebuy period with long rebuy then blinds return to something more realistic after addon to encourage gamble. can add this to both tuesdays and thursdays.
On thursday:
Would love to just see you guys turn this into a high stakes sko, ko, pko day. Add a bunch of mid stakes / high stakes tournaments unique to this day.
mini thrill (buy in of 215 plus 215, 250 plus 250, or 162 plus 162). put guarantee of 200k.
add same 50 rebuy with big guarantee.
These are bare minimums. However, I think for these days to truly succeed, you need an additional 3-5 tournaments on each day. Could easily put a 109, a 109 turbo, a 162, a 215..any of these buyins. You could also take one week a month where you raise the guarantees of every major touranment on tue and thur. so one week a month, the super tue becomes the super tue 700k gtd, etc..as long as you build out satelitte system these will be huge success.
Adding only one tournament to a schedule will not be enough to impact it. however, provide something comprehensive and attractive over the course of a couple hours will have huge impacts. As for timing, i would throw all of this in a window 2 hours to 2 1/2 before and after super tue and thrill start times.
As for the schedule as a whole, I think a weekly 700 turbo with sick gtd and a monthly 2k would work just fine, just not sure would to put them.
As for sundays, so simple..mini wu, mini million, mini sunday 500..i mean luke i have respect for you, but the amount of weight you put into those 900k emails is laughable. You can look at any historical email or mail campaign. the effectiveness and reach of those campaigns is always on the low side but still effective enough cost wise to make them worth it. they are never home runs. they are more like bunts and singles. most people didn't see that email before they saw those tournaments, me included. Those are the single biggest piece of low hanging fruit currently on your plate. They will be a smash every single week without any promotion or marketing dollars needed. All you have to do is add them to schedule, give them a color that pops. count your money. i mean, why this is such a fight is beyond me.
other ideas for tourneys...big 215/big 320/hot320..these could be daily, tue/thur, sun..tue/thur/sun.
I'd like to point out that your competition is listening and incorporating many of the ideas asked for in this thread. one year ago, i played on stars and tilt and only on sundays on 888. nowadays, every day i am firing up party as they now have a daily 109 50k and a 109 20k and some good satties into live events and their online rollers. 888 continues to listen to us and now has a daily offering of several 109's, 55's and their tuesday and thursday high stakes offerings are doing quite well. they have continued to expand their schedule and raise gurantees so i now load them up daily as well.
Fulltilt is laughable so i only play the one major on sundays now and thats it. ACR, Bovada, Ipoker, and Ongame have at least one or two touraments that i can also add to my schedule. Lets be clear. I absolutely hate loading up additional software and clickign across three or four sites. I would much prefer to just load up stars, but we are literally forced to load up additional sites to fill up our screens with offerings. its laughable to me that everyone around you seems to agree and is responding by expanding high stakes offerings and putting sizable guarantees on them and not watching them "organically grow/wither" for six months, yet everytime asking for more offerings if fought with tooth and nail.
The current schedule is withered. Just gotta be honest about it. While many at stars may be proud of the progress they have made and how they have made the schedule better or w/e, understand that the players/consumers don't feel that way. Only sunday still has that feeling that gets us going, knowing that you may have woken up with just a few dollars and a dream and by the time you go to bed that night, you may be living a dream. Thats what has always been the attraction of online and the allure of it. that you sit down click some buttons and your life changes. and only sunday provides that feelign anymore and even sundays are starting to lose their luster.
I can use some observations from PCA to drive home my points:
stars put 100 dollar flipaments on there to attract recreational players who would just want to flick around 100 dollars and have a good time. these tournaments did horrible. they had a guy on the mic constantly screaming this mtt doing his best used car salesman pitch trying to get people in. they even gave you a trophy and had trouble filling these. Why? its cuz stars doesn't really understand their customer at all. this recreational guy who wants to flick around 100 dollars doesn't exist..if the guy is at the pca with everything on the schedule he is carefully selecting what he plays and how he spends his money, unless he is rich then he could give a phuk and the same with high stakes players. if you think i'm walking all the way from the cove to the tournament room to flip for 100 bucks, then you have misjudged how far the walk is from the cove.
These tournaments where a waste of space, a waste of an offering, and a waste of the guys voice on the microphone.
so what tournaments did do well? well, the 3k opening event because it had a cute red title on it of LAPT Main Event. the 2k side right after it cuz is had a cute red title of high roller on it and both perceived to have a good gtd even tho none promised. surprisingly, at each ept stop the 2k high roller always does about double the amount of people that the same 2k side event offered later in the week but without the cute red title on it does. the other events that did well where the high rollers and big buy in turbos. so lets look at it.
the lapt main and 2k high roller do well because they are the lower buy in high stakes offerings with "implied" guarantees. huge field big prizes up top change your life stuff. as such the field is often comprised of a huge recreational component. the high rollers do well because it appeals to high stakes degen who is willing to go thru bigger bankroll swings to play much smaller field where a deep run can make a difference to his bankroll instead of a disappointment. And the turbos do well despite many complaints i heard about their rake simply because those same degens are chasing losses and after playing for days and days all week, they are happy to play something that will end in hours.
Note in the above there was no reference to a true recreational player. because imo he simply doesn't exist for the most part. and the data on the flipouts seem to support that. what you have in the current ecosystem live i think represents online as well at least in mid-high stakes. A bunch of guys who are not recs but not pros, somewhere inbetween. They have dreams of hitting it big and want to play things that will accomplish that. These are the guys who show up for the eureka, ukipt, lapt main events and sides. They are taking calculated risks with a portion of their bankroll and trying to reach for the stars. the rest are pros who have been in poker for years. we have become desensitized to playing for small sums of money and are chasing scores that change at least our month and preferably year or life. Most of us, even the most diehard online guys have transitioned to at least 60/40 live vs online because online can't satisfy those cravings anymore on a regular basis. outside of scoop, wcoop, and sundays we are dying with your offerings. even tccop tbh fails to really excite us anymore outside of the opening sunday and closing sunday..the rest is pretty meh overall. we only show up on your site when you really give us a reason too and with so many things in life and other poker options competing for our attention, you are losing us. I prefer to sit in my chair and click buttons on pokerstars. I don't really want to cross the border, go to airport, hop on a plane and fly half way across the world to click buttons. The fact that i now do that 70% of the year speaks only to stars failures to provide offerings that keep me and many like me excited enough to logon. We haven't left, we are just waiting for a reason for us to come back. Start with tuesdays and thursdays and you might have something.
