Sunday, November 11, 2007

Giving Thanks tourney structure

Well that one turned out better than I thought it would.

* Despite starting late, the tourney ended up finishing earlier than expected.

* There were twelve players which put six players across two tables. I thought six would be on the short handed side but I think it worked out really well. Everyone got to see a lot of hands and the blinds were low enough that when an orbit passed through, nobody was worried about the blinds hitting them.

* There were three rebuys. I saw how Ryan got whittled down for his rebuy which was a bit of a cooler hand. Didn't see MB or Julian's situation but three out of twelve seems like a reasonable ratio.

* Not surprisingly, everyone did the add-on. I hear what everyone is saying about the add-on and I'm working on alternatives. In this case I think the most stark example of the add-on affecting play was Ryan doing nothing but posting blinds for the better part of the 15/30 level so that he could make it to break and add-on to his stack. He even showed me that he was throwing away AcQc.

* I really like the stack depth. It allowed for players to make mistakes and get away from hands. It also meant that the stack lead could change. After Royal flattened Jason I was sure he was going to steamroll the table with his commanding chip lead but then a couple of altercations with Julian and Marsh happened and the stacks evened out again. I wish I could easily track the average M for when players got eliminated because I think it would be substantially higher than other tournaments meaning that players got to go out on their own terms instead of being blinded out.

* Total chip count was 12 buys + 3 rebuys + 12 add-ons = 27. 27 * 2000 = 54,000 chips in play. When the bubble was burst the blinds were 300/600 and the average chip stack was 13.5K or an M of 15 giving everyone room to maneuver. Going into heads up the blinds were only 500/1000 with the average chip stack being 27K or an M of 18, even more leeway.

That's how I saw it at least. Feedback?

1 comment:

Marshall said...

I thought the structure was really good. My ideal tournament structure would be: Buy in for X amount of chips. No add-ons, and if you lose, you are done.

That being said, I totally see the upside to having a rebuy. I think its super important that it's at least as much money as the original buy in.

Here is my mentality: I love tournaments for 2 main reasons;
1) You can only lose a finite amount of money. No matter what, you are only in as deep as you bought in for. No matter how tilted you get, you can't lose any more money once you lose.

2) You are in a fight for your very tournament life every hand. I love that I can pressure someone enough that if they put their stack in jeopardy, they lose the whole tournament. In a cash game, they can always fall back on the "I guess I can just rebuy if I am wrong" thing.

I thought the single rebuy early was acceptable in every way. I could have done without the add-on because I still don't really understand the point.

Chips wise, I went up early, then evened back to starting size, then got to sit for a lonngg time being completely card dead. And I felt like my stack was fine, I never quite got to pure desperation mode, and I was folding pretty much every hand.

Just about right if you ask me.