Well done Des,
Only one event to go and you can put a seal on season 1, a great effort by your whole team for which a lot of us are very grateful (mostly those of us with medals :-))
Good luck to mark and nosey for the last event, hopefully one of you will get 2nd...to me of course.
75-100 bucks does seem a bit cheap though, it"s actually cheaper to win the World Amatuer than it is to win a national...i"m not complaining though as i would play it regardless and although the money is secondary to the title (or in fact third to the added prize of a wsop seat which would be second to the title :-) ), I suspect the pot will be bigger than for a national anyway. Just doesn"t seem quite right in the scale of things.
My only moan would be my usual moan about the points allocation, particularly for online tourneys, it still seems a bit harsh that you can beat 15 people in plymouth and get 9 points but you can struggle your way through 250 online only to finish 10th and get squat. I"m unclear why online is undervalued like this?
Surely the online points allocation could be done in a similar way to normal payout structures? there"s plenty of structures that could be applied pretty much as they are with a bit of judicious rounding thrown in. Example, 270 entrants, you could either go for 27 points for 1st and then work down to 27th getting one point or if you wanted to stick to the maximum of 18 as per the live events then you could spread them over 27 places, the final table could get from 18-10 points, 2nd last table could get 9 down to 5 spread roughly evenly then 20th -27th get 4 down to 1 point again spread roughly evenly.
I"m sure everyone has better ideas but at least the online points should be equivalent to live tourneys, they"re probably harder to win.( i did read someone talking about this before and going on about travelling to live events etc. well it"s a poker championship, not a travelling championship :-) )
This way, consistency would be better rewarded regardless of whether live or online and give you a better spread of players in the rankings.
Gripe over.
The password issue is interesting, the games used to be password protected and although apat wants more members, what you"ll get is potentially thousands of one time players who don"t care about apat and probably won"t play again and if you find yourself having to do administration for thousands of members most of whom are not active and only played one apat by accident/coincidence, you"ll be making life difficult for no reason. That doesn"t apply so much to the live players, but an online tourney can have any name and it doesn"t need to mean anything to a player, it"s just another tourney that they fancy at the time. If it lets you enter then why not play. That will definitely be the case with the world championship due to the wsop seat but the way i"m looking at that is if I want to be the world champion then i need to beat anyone and everyone so it"s not bothering me (but i can see why nosey would be a bit miffed as he"s not just concerned about the single event but the whole season, possibly 1000 players whose only interest is the wsop seat and who only play in the very last event of season 1 thereby influencing the point of the whole season over the past year, to find the the APAT Champion....would be fairer to not have the seat as an added prize but i"m certainly not suggesting that :-). Oh des, you guys have so many hard problems like that one to deal with lol glad it"s not me.
Suppose you could just make the seat an additional prize for existing members, that would at least force people to notice the event and register with apat, surely making a bit of effort if you want a good prize wouldn"t be that hard, and if they have to find something out about apat to register then there"s a better chance they"ll stick with it rather than just play the one tourney for the wsop seat)
Also gives you a chance to filter out the pro"s, well, the one"s you know about at least...
Anway, thanks again to apat for an enjoyable season 1 so far and i look forward to playing in the Worlds (and taking most of nosey"s chips again :-)).
Best Regards,
jukes.
p.s. note to self, learn to write short emails...
