Added Aria tournaments and fixed my color coding on the comparison page.
RedOak, I think you found a way to technically exploit S-Points, but I don't think you've succesfully demonstrated that Levels 1-5 are equally important to later levels.
In your 259.9/800/1600 through 36 Levels tournament you changed all levels, making the thing a crapshoot from the beginning. Which, I guess, makes Level 1 super important since you barely have 3 big blinds to start. But other than that you haven't shown why Levels 1-5 are equally important.
To demonstrate that Levels 1-5 truly are important you need to take a tournament, tweak just those levels and show how it demonstrably effects it. So maybe change levels 1-5 in your tournament to 0/25/50. That gives everyone 100 big blinds through 5 levels, delaying the crapshoot to Level 6. I agree that would be a nominally better tournament, but not signficantly. The crapshoot is happening at Level 6 and even if you tripled up in the first 5 levels you still have less than 10 big blinds.
Again, to support your assertion, you need to change the first 5 levels of a tournament and show those changes signficantly effect (good or bad) the tournament's structure as a whole.
That's one discussion. The next is that yes, S-Points can technically be exploited. However, I don't think it can be in practice. Neither of the examples above would ever fly for a real tournament. Poker players are observant, mathematical, adverse to change and vocal. Check out the discussion on Planet Hollywood's Quantum Tournament to see all of those characteristics in action. Your tournament would create a chorus of 'WTFs' and have people crapping on it as soon as it was released. Something so deviant from expectations will be met with skepticism--which is the whole point of S-Points. I want people to question tournament structures.
When I was testing my formula I made tournaments that exploited S-Points in various ways, but they all turned out super weird looking and it's blantaly obvious something's up. I encourage trying to break the thing--The formula is up at my site (
http://www.rainbowspuppiessunshine.c...about.php#Math) so you can find out where to exploit it. Here let me help, here's how to attack its weak points:
1. Change level lengths to 1 minute after blinds equal starting stack
2. Have Level 6 Blinds be enormous compared to Level 10.
3. Don't change the blinds from Levels 6 -18
But I don't think S-Points can be manipulated in a practical way without raising suspicion on first glance at the structure sheet.