Quote:
Originally Posted by mikelbyl
Hey Greg - thanks for taking the time to share your observations. Obviously what you say deserves to be taken seriously. Our experience, though, has been amazingly positive to date. We've run events with a similar format several times in the past 18 months, and many other events using structure have also been run in properties around the world over the same time-frame (Dusk Till Dawn, Kings, Barcelona, etc). Our experience has been that while there may seem to be a theoretical risk of such shenanigans, in practice there has been nothing to be concerned about.
Our tournament floors and dealers are all exceptionally well trained and attentive for possible issues, and as far as I know there has been no hint of unacceptable play. Part of the reason why there haven't been problems may be due to the sheer size of these tournaments - random seating with 800+ players on Day 2 really limits the opportunity for anyone to try anything untoward.
I really hope we'll see you at an event at Playground sometime!
Appreciate your thoughtful response, and glad you've not had any issues to date.
I'm anti-best stack forward in general. Actually, if you want to allow people who have bagged to reenter a later day 1, I think that's fine. In order to ensure that no shenanigans are being motivated by the structure, it actually works better if they are simply allowed to combine all their bags at the start of day 2. Now each of their chips is just as valuable to them, as each chip is to every other player in the field at that time. No motivation to dump to a friend, as the two of them don't gain any equity in doing so.
Even if the player is never going to cheat, if they already have a bag, they can be correctly motivated to make some strange plays as the end of day 1 approaches. If I have 50K in the bag from day 1a, and my stack is <50K as the end of day 1b approaches, there is no reason for me to play sensibly, as finishing with 40K is the same as finishing with 0 in most best stack forward events. So now I shove dark, or make some other -EV play, because it isn't -EV to me, since I bagged that previous stack. Your system takes away most of this motivation at the end of these later day 1s, but moves that motivation to near the end of expiration period on day 2 (i.e., the time when the unused smaller stacks get voided out).
But I agree with you that in practice, it apparently hasn't been much of a problem, even in locations with smaller fields than yours. And that's great. But it might be even better if just removed the easy motivation/temptation completely.
I hope to make it up there sooner rather than later. Let's talk about booking one of my seminars for your next series. ;-)
Thanks, Greg Raymer (FossilMan)