Ive read the posts here and agree mostly with a few of these points;
$20+2 Buy in. It worked before, didnt harm your entrants, and increases the viability of playing for 5-6 hours.
4000 Stack with 12m blinds will work, you can overdo deepstacks by giving people too many chips with too long a level.
I like the idea of reintoducing a password, as someone pointed out earlier, it didnt harm sign ups, and probably helps to keep the jingo bingo bango riff raff out.
I"d like to bring another idea to the fore, perhaps its too late for this season, but i could never work out why points were awarded on a final table only scheme. This means (although unlikely to happen) that the person who wins a 100ppl tourny, will win the same amount of points as a person who wins a 250ppl tourny. This i hope you can see is massively unjust. The way i would award it, would be to have a configuration depending on amount of entries. Also, i feel the places that get points should be increased to the cash point (whyshould those who are rewarded with cash not be rewarded with points?). To reach the last 20 players of an 200+ player MTT is a very good achievement, and i think it shud be rewarded by points. I believe, (with good evidence) that an implementaion of this strategy will maintain the quality of the leaderboard, but importantly mean that decent play will be rewarded.
Please consider this strategy, as i really do feel it makes more sense.
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I agree with the first few ideas but I don"t agree with the idea of changing the points depending on the number of entrants.
Some could be against this idea purely because its better to know exactly how many points are on offer before you start.
This is a valid argument and could make a significant difference to the outcome of a championship, if the top of the championship is tight like season 1, then one win could provide a new overall leader. Although we are likely to get a number of runners for the final of season 1 because of the extra prize involved, normally, the last few tournaments of a season will have fewer runners because a lot of people who are no longer in the running won"t play once they see that there"s no chance of them winning the overall race (sad but true). If there were less points available for tournaments with fewer runners this would mean that if you did well near the beginning you would, on average, gain more points then if you did well at the end - and I think most people would agree that it would be fundamentally unfair to reward some and penalise others, purely based on where in the season chronologically they happen to hit good form.
However, I have a much simpler objection to this idea. That is that the ranking points should primarily reflect skill. I don"t think that the winner of a 1000 runner tournament is 10 times more skilfull than the winner of a 100 runner tournament. I would suspect that (a) they just happen to enter different tournaments, (b) they have a similar amount of skill, and (c) the winner of the 1000 runner tournament needed just a bit more luck (an extra coin flip or 2 to win). So would it be fair for 2 players with roughly the same skill to get different points, just because one choose to enter a different tournament and/or had a little bit of extra luck?
It isnt really unfair at all. The points are awarded on allocation of dificulty. A small tournament is easier to win than a large one. Look at it this way, it is FAR more unfiar to accrue the same amount of points as someone who has had to beat a lot fewer people to those points. After running and participating in a highly recognised live league for four years, i can assure you that there is no loss of drama, probably moreso. In the first two years, the title went between 2 very good players, and was only decided in the last game of the league.
I believe your concept of tournament sizes dropping off a bit preposterous really. Surely, no matter what points structure you have, there will have been some point where the average player could no longer win (or even hope to win). With your logic, this would mean that the tournaent entries would drop off, (it would be interested to know if they did significantly drop off) This blows a veritable crater in you"re reasoning, as either way, tournaments will drop off in number, however the points are awarded. BUT importantly, with the current system, as tournaments drop off in size, it is all the more easier to win the tournaments, which,is of great unfairness those who won bigger tournaments earlier in the season. As you said "it would be fundamentally unfair to reward some and penalise others, purely based on where in the season chronologically they happen to hit good form."
Your point regarding the skill required to win a 100 vs a 1000 tourny.
You didnt understand my initial post; points are awarded on a entrant based sliding scale. The winner of a 1000 person tournament would not win a prize of 10x more. Also, i believe that it does require FAR more skill to win a tournament of 1000 players, and your idea that it only requires one more coin flip is the worst rhetoric ive heard in a long time. I"ve won 100 ppl tourneys by literally winning a dozen hands, could you do that in a 1000ppl mtt? Its like saying it takes approximately the same amount of skill to win your local casino MTT than the $5000 omaha WSOP event (back in the days when there was only about a 1000 entrants) granted that there is likely to be a higher standard of play, but you get my point im sure.
Also, it is also very unlikely that there will be a time in an APAt season, where the tournys swing from 100 people to 1000.
It can all be boiled down to which is fairer, awarding the same points 100% ignorant of the size of field, or awarding points based on logical conjecture, that states that the bigger tournaments get, the harder they are to win, therefore require larger prizes.
And finally, if ive played 5 APAt MTTS, and came 3rd in one of them, 11th, 13th and 19th in three and failed to cash in the other two, then why on EARTH should someone who has played 20 APAt MTTs, and came 2nd in one of them, and failed to cash in all other tournaments have more points than me?
And the beauty of is just that, regular cashes are rewarded with points, in my 3rd gamelast year, i was placed 5/11. I already had a win under my belt, and was looking forward to another big caash within the month. I got AK, found myself all in, facing AQ, and suffered the beat. I went out 11th. for 5 hours i sat there playing fantastic poker. For £30. And nothing else. Again, like you argued before, why should the way points be awarded be based on the outcomes of a coinflip? (allthough AQ vs AK is far from a coinflip , in another situation, it could easily be so).
Again apologies for length (i thin there must be summmit in my mothers genes too)