If I had my way it would be 2009 and I'd be 12 tabling again

I don't nec love re-entry either, but i think this is great. If there's one tourney i would pick for being re-entry it's by far the Million. It's just a one time thing for reaching a huge gtd, there are gonna be 40k extra random fish in the tourney, their chances will no be hurt that much.

On Party is like everyday and everything re-entry, but i'll go to correct thread to address that.

dramatic much? never seen as many complaints for stars throwing a few bucks back at us.

Could you make the client autosave or something. Almost everytime i'm grinding i loss all the new notes/favorites ect that i made. If you don't close stars properly and just put your PC on standby it forgets all the changes you made?.

Ridic that this still happens one year later.

Luke, are the current minis a test before the rollout of others? Is there a mini-rebuy, mini supersonic, mini warmup in the works?

Luke won't reply regarding the 10th SM because he probably have nothing to do with it. Probably the work of Brian who is totally disconnected from players need and current market/economy as usual.

Hey all,

Since I didn't do one last week...

I set the guarantees. There was no reason to take a risk in this case. If the tournament has demand, raising it after the first week is a reasonable strategy. I raised the guarantees the very next day. In this case, a $250K guarantee would've cost a serious chunk of money.

In the current iteration of the new schedule, I've moved it to Saturday. It will never take the place of a traditional Monday-Friday major, so I think Saturday is the best place to put it.

It changed to 15:00 starting 19 October.

Unrealistic.

Cheers!

Well, for good as of now.

The Mini-Kickoff had ~35% lower participation compared to December and the Mini-Million had ~45% lower participation.

I have a group of players from 2+2 assisting me with ideas for the new schedule.

Yes it is a one off, though I'd encourage you all to think of creative ways to help the Sunday Million this summer!

Without spending a ridiculous amount of promotional money, yes, we think this was the best way.

March 13-27 this will happen due to daylight savings on PokerStars servers. It is not a permanent change.

Why not? There is clearly an equilibrium where player behaviour changes. For instance, if it was 10x re-entry, players willing to re-enter would play much differently than if it was a regular freezeout. How much differently will you play if it is 1x re-entry, 2x re-entry, 3x re-entry, and so on?

If we thought more satellites was the answer, we'd do that and reward tickets to ensure the money went into the prize pool. We do not think that would get us there.

In December 2011 I was in Toronto grinding. A lot has changed since then!

What is the first statement based on? Making it a re-entry tournament was a requirement to put a $10M guarantee on the tournament.

Guarantee Boost!

Yes, they would! Satellites running for the Million and Kickoff are in that exact price range.

I'm open to this idea. I don't think the audience changes much if you double the buy-in in this case. Other thoughts?

It is as simple as this.

The Sunday Million has declined by approximately 20% year on year. If it gets $11M, we'll all be ecstatic, but the trends do not point to this being the case.

No, this has nothing to do with additional rake dollars. We think there is significant risk of not making the guarantee if it isn't re-entry. Either it is a re-entry tournament with $10,000,000 guaranteed, or it doesn't happen.

I'm interested to see how many times the average player re-enters in this tournament compared to other main schedule tournaments!

The $11 Phase has had overlay 4 times this year. I agree that it needs to change in some way. How do others feel? Would you play it more if it was $22?

The scope of this tournament and the length of its title has initiated an internal discussion about labeling tournaments re-entry in the lobby. Some of us think it is a term that scares players off, while others think it is an essential piece of information. Ultimately, the re-entry information is in four other places so we decided it was best to have a name which is more succinct.

Personally, I'd prefer it just live in the lobby message or as part of a registration message.

Not as of now. Surprisingly, the Sunday Storm has overlayed the past two weeks in a row and will have a $275K guarantee this week. I find it hard to believe that these tournaments influenced the participation in the Storm to a large degree, but regardless I do not know if I'll be adding the above in the future or not. The majors will change substantially in the new schedule.

Of course I'll reply! New year, new me.

This decision was made after receiving input from various stakeholders in the company. It certainly isn't fair to categorize Bryan in the way you have considering he tends to be much more active here than I am!

I'd want to sum up your post Luke by 'meh' but nevertheless thanks for answering. I wonder if Pokerstars connects drops in participation with smaller gtds, lesser VIP rewards, worse promotions (randomized ****, optins, penny promos) and overall fewer incentives to play. I think they don't, you can always blame the market.

Not sure how are you going to explain then that majority of us is playing a lot of other sites because of how bad stars offering is compared to the past. Somehow other sites seem to be able to take risks when pushing gtds and they manage to maintain their tournaments at much higher levels than Stars does for some. Just look at 888, party and stars.fr (yeah, this one baffles me the most). Why your strategy is so much different and why it seems like every other site is slowly growing and stars in decline? Pokerstars.fr overall did take noticeable hit in traffic recently as well, but you can clearly see they're trying hard to stay exciting.

edit: most important point you're missing that you talk about how 3x reentry strategy is not much different from 1x and 3x is clearly better than 1x and ensures the gtd. In other posts by Pokerstars reps it seems you guys acknowledge that majority of your players is micro/lowstake and not playing much. I'm myself around $25-$30 ABI in the past year I am playing most special freezeout $215s throughout thee year, however if it's a reentry or anything else I will most likely skip it, even if it's 2mln gtd. My problem is that it maybe a problem of many and therefore a lot of players that would pull the trigger and play SM anyway they'll decide to skip it worrying that they won't be able to reentry if they bust and stronger players will have that advantage.

hey Luke, thanks for answering. yeah im aware of the daylight savings thats why i know how better the schedule is when daylight savings are happening. just look at the posts in every years's MTT discussion threads during DST, everyone wants it to last forever. US is out, the main ppool is in europe, the best mtts are just starts too late. i think this is something you could consider when working on the new schedule.
also any hint on the new sch,,,and, when it will happen?

But what about DoGGz this doesn't work for him

Hey, don't toss me under the bus. I literally begged Luke for something like the $44 BB early on the schedule. And that tournament is booming.

But that doesn't mean the Big 11 or BB $109 is at the wrong time.

It's always been my position that the schedule needs huge changes, but the common theme during Daylight savings time is to take what we have and move it, not add new value to where we need it.

I think upping the buy-in is a surefire way of making it more successful, I think people are more inclined to play multi day tournaments when there is more up top. Also with the phase 2 being at a very busy time on a Sunday with lots of big tournaments running its less of a novelty. I would put the buy-in at either 55, 82 or 109.

What do you guys think about putting the approximate finishing time for tournaments in the lobbies?
Could that possibly make it easier for all players to play more cause they know what they can or cannot play regardless of appointments? Maybe esp. for rec players since they are the ones whose lifes are not centered around poker and could incline them to play more?

Either one of those BI's seems like a fine idea, but I see no need to remove the 11$ for that (Luke, please don't remove the 11$ )

One way to make the phase more succesful would be having even less people advance to phase2 from every phase1, making more people register the tournament for several phase 1s throughout the week, although this might mean you have to have a smaller percentage of the field finishing ITM.

Also, not being a pro, I mostly only play phase1 on sundays and sometimes saturdays, because I don't grind every sunday and I don't wanna be forced to play because I already qualified on monday or tuesday for instance. I can imagine more funplayers feel this way, so maybe more phase 1s on sunday close to the tournament (could make these "hyper-turbo last chance" or something) to attract more players to the tournament on the day phase2 takes place could grow the tournament.

I guess its fine, but not very important change in my opinion. Most guys playing these days have a pretty good idea of how long a tournament gonna last anyway.

What i do really like is the lobby showing the actual prizepools in the spesific tourney. When you see that a tourney is smashing the guarantee its so much easier to reg the tournament and play it


For example 11$ 6 K guarantted- now 8,9 K.


Very nice addition with the dynamic prizepools illustrations.

Please consider addding a 1k$ 1mill grt last sunday of every month. That Sunday, all the guarantees will be smashed.

Absolutely agree - NO NEED to remove the $11 (make the GTD smaller by all means but do not remove it)

Adding a $55, $109 or w/e is a no brainer but doing that at the expense of the $11 is just cutting your nose off to spite your face.

Maybe try having a small, med and high buy in levels for 3 different weekly phase MTTs.

Small: 11
Medium: around 33-55
Large: I guess anywhere from 82-162

Overkill I'd say.

Yea the third is nonsense if you implement the medium as they will eat each other up. The thing about cutting the 11 guarantee by half and adding a 55 is that they both would be ****ty timbeys. I think if you took the 11 and tripled the buyin you would prob get a 200k prize pool on a 100k guarantee for months to come. I for one have not played a single phase this year as its out of my buyin range.

It's in my buyin range and I don't play it. I just don't see it as that fun of a tournament. Phases didn't work on FTP well either.

these are my thoughts also.
I only play low stakes and fire a couple of anniversary SM/bigs per year (or try to sat in) and this just sucks. you know the vast majority of the player pool won't be able to re-enter so you are just giving an edge to the high stakes players.
even a hs sicko will be less inclined to make that big bluff early on or the big hero call for their tournament life when they're playing a 1/year SM with a 1M up top, so the 3x reentry chance takes that away.

really thanks hope you enjoy some 1M overlay. #karma

yeah absolutely. smaller gtd as freezout.
(obv if i was a hs player, sure it would be great to have it as a 10x reentry, no prob.)

Last special SM in december had a 5M gtd and it reached 6M.
For this one you have more time to promote it and (i suppose) more resources going into that promotion since it's the anniversary.
You could at least make a 8M gtd with no overlay and keep it a freezout like it has always been.

luke please put this forward to the developing team, make the bounty numbers appear in the client replay for the thursday thrill ect, fun players love to see the big numbers and will make watching the finals alot more interesting for people as well , i know its been said before but with bounty builders taking over they need to have the bounty $ inserted in the HH, players love to work on their game and without it we cant really look at spots so clear too, win win situation for us here, make it happen asap!

also have to agree, sunday milly really shouldnt be a reentry unless its july or whatever and even then absolutely only max of one rentry per player, 3 is a joke

also +1 to the bounty lobbies. theyve existed over a year now and still its a clusterfck in the lobbies. make the numbers right ffs, it cant be that the flagship bounty builders make it look like the first place is about 60k when its always 85k or sth like that