Tuesday, April 17, 2007
Mea Culpa
So I hosed up a tournament I was hosting pretty good.
THE ANATOMY OF A HOSED UP TOURNAMENT
I was looking at the blind schedule for the WSOP $50k HORSE Tournament and I noticed that the cost of playing each round doesn't really follow a smooth, even ramp upwards like other blind schedules (WSOP 10K NLHE ). Instead, the increases in the cost to play each round (blinds, antes, and forced bets) was kind of "chunky". By chunky, I mean that some rounds have no increases (i.e., round 6 and 7 both have blinds of $500/$1000). Other rounds have a large increase (i.e., the cost to play increases by 64% from round 7 to round 8). On average, though, the blind schedule has increases of 21% round over round.
So I thought I'd re-engineer this defective blind schedule and build one that had the same average increase (21%) from round to round but was a lot smoother. I also thought I'd figure out a way to avoid using red ($5) chips. So I build a totally kick ass, smoothed out, blind schedule for the HORSE tournament (see schedule) - but I had to start the blinds/antes pretty high so I could use the green $25 chip as the minimum denomination.
Then, the next task is to determine the starting chips.
I have a pretty fail safe system for determining the starting chip count. Here's the secret - it works amazingly well. Whatever the big blind is during the round that completes at the 5 hour mark (usually round 10), well - that's the starting chip count. This system has never really failed me when hosting a NL or PL tournament.
So I looked at my beautiful HORSE blind schedule and found that the big blind was around $3000 at the 10th level. So there I had it. The starting chip count would be $3000.
IT ALL STARTS TO UNRAVEL
It didn't take long for the players to recognize that the starting chip counts was very low compared to the first blind level. The big blind on the first level was $200. This makes each player holding only 15 big blinds. No good - obviously.
When I look at some of the blind schedules for the WSOP games this year, it seems like they are starting players off with around 50 big blinds on the first level and the levels escalate so that starting chips are about 10x the BB/lower limit established for round 10 (although this number varies between 2x and 25x). Here are the results:
THE ANATOMY OF A HOSED UP TOURNAMENT
I was looking at the blind schedule for the WSOP $50k HORSE Tournament and I noticed that the cost of playing each round doesn't really follow a smooth, even ramp upwards like other blind schedules (WSOP 10K NLHE ). Instead, the increases in the cost to play each round (blinds, antes, and forced bets) was kind of "chunky". By chunky, I mean that some rounds have no increases (i.e., round 6 and 7 both have blinds of $500/$1000). Other rounds have a large increase (i.e., the cost to play increases by 64% from round 7 to round 8). On average, though, the blind schedule has increases of 21% round over round.
So I thought I'd re-engineer this defective blind schedule and build one that had the same average increase (21%) from round to round but was a lot smoother. I also thought I'd figure out a way to avoid using red ($5) chips. So I build a totally kick ass, smoothed out, blind schedule for the HORSE tournament (see schedule) - but I had to start the blinds/antes pretty high so I could use the green $25 chip as the minimum denomination.
Then, the next task is to determine the starting chips.
I have a pretty fail safe system for determining the starting chip count. Here's the secret - it works amazingly well. Whatever the big blind is during the round that completes at the 5 hour mark (usually round 10), well - that's the starting chip count. This system has never really failed me when hosting a NL or PL tournament.
So I looked at my beautiful HORSE blind schedule and found that the big blind was around $3000 at the 10th level. So there I had it. The starting chip count would be $3000.
IT ALL STARTS TO UNRAVEL
It didn't take long for the players to recognize that the starting chip counts was very low compared to the first blind level. The big blind on the first level was $200. This makes each player holding only 15 big blinds. No good - obviously.
When I look at some of the blind schedules for the WSOP games this year, it seems like they are starting players off with around 50 big blinds on the first level and the levels escalate so that starting chips are about 10x the BB/lower limit established for round 10 (although this number varies between 2x and 25x). Here are the results:
So, for my tournament, I should have started players off with around 50 big blinds. Since the starting big blind was $200, the starting chips should have been around $10k. Also, the BB or lower limit for the 10th round should have been around 1/10th of $10k ($1000). Luckily for me, I had set the 10th level at $1000.
WHAT TO DO
After a couple of "post start" corrections to the starting chips (first adding $3000. Then, adding $5000), players started with $11K. This seemed to appease everyone and in looking at the table above, it looked like $11K was right in-line with the blind schedules that they are using at the WSOP.
INTERESTING OBSERVATION
So if you are looking for a WSOP event to play this year, you may want to look at the ratio of the starting chips to the first blind level. This will give you an idea of how fast the tournament starts. You may also want to take a look at the ratio of starting chips to the BB on level 10. This should give you an idea of how fast the tournamant escalates.
If you're a bad player like me, you may want to neutralize a bit of the skill advantage of the other players by choosing an event that starts fast and escalates fast (i.e., $1500 NLHE). If you're a good player, you may want to find an event that starts slow and escalates slowly (the best "values" here seem to be the $1500 SHOE or the $2500 HORSE and of course the $10k NLHE Championship event).
What's missing from this analysis is that for the NLHE events, the antes really need to be considered....maybe I'll do that another time - or maybe not.
Comments:
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You need to make one change and that is that the starting chips are double the amount of the buy in for the WSOP this year.
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# posted by 
: 5:53 PM
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