This is good work here. Much better than other formulas I've seen tried.

Yes, that 66% increase in chips made it better than last year (290 S-Points). Also, the binds/antes aren't increasing slower in comparative levels, so that made it score more as well.

Can anyone point me to the link that had this year's WSOP tournaments analysis?

http://www.rainbowspuppiessunshine.c...1=2016&s_Text=

http://www.rainbowspuppiessunshine.c...1=2016&s_Text=

Thanks.

I may be hallucinating here, but I thought I looked at the "Tournaments" page of this nifty calculator a few weeks ago and saw non-WSOP events listed. Were these posted at some point, or am I mistaken?

Mistaken. I'm not putting anything up until they post valid structure sheets. I keep checking for structures, but the only thing coming out are schedules and promises.

Plog,
I like the effort you put into this, but I just feel skipping the first few levels misses a lot. The WSOP for 2016 is changing 3 levels before level 5 that really cut down the blind off time. Using Arnold Synder's Poker tournament formula, the skill rating goes from 30 to 19 in a 1k event, but by using your calculator, the skill level actually goes up since one of the later levels has a slight ante or blind decrease.
Please consider an alternative to your method that takes into account all the early levels.

I've updated my site to accomodate all type of hold'em and omaha events so it has more than just NLH this year:

http://www.rainbowspuppiessunshine.c...ournaments.php


Use the Tournament Filter in the left column to limit the list to just the limit/games you want to see.

Unfortunately, its less than 50 days until June and only WSOP has published good versions of its structure sheets. Binion's has illegible versions on Facebook, Planet Hollywood's still has errors, Venetian, Golden Nugget, Aria & Wynn aren't even giving promises.

Anybody have email addresses we can use to campaign for them?

Hey, plog. Thanks for adding PH to your tournament list. Hopefully the other venues will release accurate structure sheets soon.

One bit of analysis which I think would be really useful, and which I don't think your list depicts, is relative value. It's easy to look at your s-points and deduce one tournament has better structure than another. But it's not so easy or straightforward to deduce if one provides better value. Now, as a poker player I realize that different people get value from different things. Some value their time, some value their money, some value their required level of effort, etc, etc. So this isn't meant to be the end all be all of analysis of which tournaments a player should choose to play. However, it would be nice to see exactly what you're paying for in terms of structure.

At first I thought you could just divide your s-points by the buy-in and come up with some normalized index. However, in reality buy-in is not the key figure. It's the vig that represents what players are actually paying, and the rest is just what they're competing over. So if you divide your s-points (the relative structure strength) by the vig (in dollars), and come up with a way of normalizing that figure, I think it would be an excellent addition to your already useful s-points calculation.

Thoughts?

aka--I agree, but not certain how to normalize the vig% to S-Points relationship. The main problem is that S-Points isn't scaled--it doesn't have an upper-bound (e.g. WSOP Main Event has 339 S-Points) like Vig % does (it's a percent so 0-100). When I get time I will pull a few tournaments and see if I can tease out a formula.

Also, I've loaded Binion's and Planet Hollywood into my site. The Venetian has theirs on their site, but they only list about 15 to 16 levels on each structure sheet--I need 18 levels to calculate S-Points. There's no way they expect their tournaments to end within 15 levels (15 levels * 40 minutes = 10 hours), especially when the structure sheet lists when day 2 resumes.

I think if you email Tommy (the TD at the venetian) at Thomas.Larosa@sands.com, he might be able to get you the full structure sheets. They have all the full sheets on premises, I'm just not sure if they are all electronic yet.

As for incorporating relative value in your formula, I think you might want to look at it as, how many S-points does a dollar buy in each tourney. So, its not so much vig%, but s-points divided by actual vig value. That would be a good start.

Thanks aka. I emailed him and he told me what I needed. Venetian has been added to my site.

When I get time next week I will do what you advise--I just have some reservation about a really cheap and poorly structured tournament having a good ratio. I know that some of the $360 WSOP Circuit events have 65 S-Points so that's around $5 and S-Point, which means one of those Binions $130 tournaments only needs 25 S-Points to be comparable. In fact they have 37 S-Points and the vig is around 20%, so that doesn't seem right that they score more that way. Maybe I use Vig dollars or Vig% instead.

In any case, if you want to play around with it, you can use my site and export the data to Excel. There's an 'Export' link at the top of the Tournament data.

Added Wynn, waiting on Aria and Golden Nugget still.

akashenk, I did some some analysis comparing vig to S-Points in two simple ways:

1 -> [SPoints]/[Vig%] -> How many SPoints you get for each Vig percentage point

2 -> [SPoints]/[Total Vig Dollars] -> How many SPoints you get for each dollar going to the vig

Using Method 1 above, all the higher buy-in events rose to the top (WSOP = 56.5 S-Points per Vig percentage). Method #1 was similar to basically sorting the list by buy-in. The higher the buy-in the more SPoints you got per vig percentage point.

Using Method 2 created a more scattered list. The Planet Hollywood 7PM $100 events rose to the top (3.15 SPoints for every $1 in vig). However, the Vig% on those events is 20%. That makes me leery of saying method #2 is a good one.

So, in the end, I don't know what method to use. Perhaps its one that is more complex, something that takes into account both method #1 and method #2.

What if you divided the SPoints by 1-Vig%? That would give you the SPoints per % of dollars paid into the prize pool, so should provide some indication of the value of the tournament. I haven't dug into your calculation of SPoints but I assume it already factors in the impact of the vig on the value of the tournament so doing what I suggest might give a reasonable relative ranking of tournaments. Try it and see what you get.

I believe I got similar results. There are a few aspects to the analysis that I think need to be taken into account.

1) Is it fair to compare tourneys with different purposes... for instance satellites vs MTTs vs Survivors? In my analysis I grouped these so, for instance I didn't compare a low S satellite with a high S MTT for value.

2) I agree that comparing S/Vig$ and S/Vig% each have their warts. I'm trying to see if I can come up with a way of resolving them. I'm wondering, if in your design of the S-Point formula, you gave any thought as to whether or not it was linear. I mean, if a tourney A has 150 S-point and Tourney B has 100, does that really mean A is 50% better than B, from a structure standpoint? Maybe its more than 50% better in reality. Maybe its less. I've come across this when thinking abut monetary value. The relative value of $2 to $1 is the same as $2000 to $1000, however I think the vast majority of people would agree there is a much bigger difference between the latter. So I think using a ratio may not be what were looking for. But I'll keep plugging away.

Thank you for posting all this analysis.

With equal starting stacks and length of rounds for Senior events what accounts for most of the difference in the S points of Venetian at 77 while Wynn is 87. Missing rounds, different ante structure, that all?

Yes, the Wynn's Senior Event has a round that Venetian's doesn't. Specifically Level 7. That pushes everything back and makes the Wynn's a little bit better in terms of S-Points.

Uploaded Golden Nugget's data to my site. Nothing to brag about--so-so structures, horibble vig.

+1. All the WSOP events <= $1,000 have much less play this year. With the new blind structure, the cost per round more than triples from level 2 to 3! It goes from 150 (50/100) to 475 (75/150 + 25 ante * 10 seats). Antes will start in level 3 already instead of level 5 from previous years. The event I played last year will probably be ITM in Day 1 this year, instead of several hours into Day 2.

For the $565-$1,000 NLHE events with 5,000 starting chips, which most recreational players will take their WSOP shot at, such as the Colossus, Ladies, Seniors, Tag Team and Casino Employees, this means that you are already in the Orange Zone by level 3 compared to level 5 before. The Patience Factor worsens from 30.51 to 21.12. The blind-off time (world's most patient player) worsens from 5.52 hours to 4.6.

Anyway, thanks for all the work. I shall use it a lot, along with the spreadsheets of SpaceyFCB and Arnold Snyder.

Have you seen the other thread about comparing 2016 to 2015?

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/65...tures-1609228/

It got me thinking and I dug into my data and compared all tournaments that I could match from 2016 to 2015. Here's what I came up with:

http://www.rainbowspuppiessunshine.c...is.php#compare

Basically, Nash is dead on. Lower level bracelet events got worse. But the higher ones got better. The chart above compares everything from last year, not just WSOP. At the top, I put a list of best tournaments in Vegas this year in various cost categories.

Thanks for comparing it with last year, very interesting! Like your ranking of best casinos etc... Wouldn't mind a shame list for the worst too...

Think the extended play from 2015 should only be compared with summer solstice in 2016...

How do these new structures compare with something as pedestrian as the Daily Deepstacks? I felt like I got a lot of play with those, even when I didn't cash.

The Rio Daily "Deepstacks" actually are some of the worst value! Using Gogie's calculations, the $235 DS has very low S-Points of only 21 and also a low Patience Factor of only 16. Its rake is 19.1%.

The $145+$40 DS is even worse with a rake of 21.6% and 1/3 less starting chips. The $100+$35 DS is unbeatable with a rake of 25.9% and only 5K chips. The $300+$65 DS is not much better with a rake of 17.8%, and only 20-minute levels instead of 30 for all the other DS.