The Merge Gaming Network’s recent restructuring of its multi-table tournament (MTT) offerings went into effect last week, with a new slate of tournaments debuting yesterday. Specifically being offered on Merge flagship sites Carbon Poker and Aced.com (Aced’s home is actually Aced.ag, an Australian domain), the new tourney schedule attempts to address some of the previous rough spots in the Merge MTT lineup, offering plenty of opportunities for players while still attempting to maximize revenue for the site.
The changes apply completely only to Carbon and Aced, and are not necessarily applicable to other Merge skins, which are not required to offer the complete Merge MTT lineup and can even schedule other “in-house” tourneys of their own.
The schedule revamping’s effects won’t really be known for weeks or months, though there’s a noticeable difference even at first glance. The changes seem designed to be a bit more friendly to lower- and mid-ranged players, who had been been left with a fairly sparse schedule in recent months. Carbon and Aced had previously placed a heavy emphasis on the sites’ premier, high-dollar events, offered both nightly and weekly, to the detriment of many of the smaller tournaments.
Given that the Merge tournaments also feature, almost exclusively, both extended late-registration periods and re-entry options, the old Merge Carbon/Aced MTT schedule actually made itself largely unplayable for many of the site’s would-be players.
The new updates, first announced on an affiliate site last week and since then expanded on via several media outlets, are at least a step in the right direction. The one thing that appears to be a negative at first glance is a trimming of the guarantee in the Sunday $33, $60, and $109 re-entry tourneys, from $20,000 to $15,000 for each.
However, the cutback in the larger guarantees is offset in large part by the addition of quite a few small-guarantee events, scattered around the clock. One of the new features rolled out on Sunday is a tiny $500 “Variety Hour” tournament which goes on early each evening, usually featuring an unusual format which the Merge Network programmed for long ago but seldom gets players to play. For instance a $500 Razz tourney this evening, with a common $10+1 buy-in, went off with about $160 in overlay — good value for those who can play Razz and who were around to spot the value.
The extended late-registration times that have become a staple of Merge in the last three years aren’t going away, but at least Carbon and Aced have taken some small steps to standardize them. The deep-stacked tourneys that run on the site from Monday through Saturday, and feature at least 5,000 chips as a minimum buy-in, will have a standard two-hour and 20-minute late-registration period. The Sunday “deep” events, with generally larger fields, will have standard three-hour late-reg periods.
That’s lengthy — a lot of players would say too lengthy — because of the time commitment players have to accept to go deep. On the plus side, MTTs with shorter stacks or turbo formats will have shorter late-registration times as well, typically an hour to an hour and a half for turbos, and 40 minutes for hyper-turbos.
That’s also pushing the edge, and can often create some silly bubble situations, allowing players to rebuy repeatedly just outside the money bubble to snipe a cheap tourney cash. I’ve argued in a couple of piece published elsewhere that this is not great formatting; particularly when considering no-hold’em tourneys, the extended late-registration period creates highly abnormal circumstances.
Here’s a snapshot from a tournament last night on Carbon, to illustrate:
The buy-in was for 3,000 starting chips, but the blinds had already reached 1,000 / 2,000 and was set to jump to 1,500 / 3,000 … this with fully 15 minutes of late registration remaining. So as players were being knocked out, they were coerced into buying right back in by the format, as were as a couple of other lurkers who were watching the inevitable unfold.
At this point seven spots were scheduled to be paid, but so many last-minute snipers showed up that eight or nine spots were paid. And the imbalance grows between the short stacks and the bigs, due to the short stacks being forced to go all-in within one or two hands. The big stacks grew bigger, and one can clearly see how they split in the chip standings at bottom-center.
Now, Merge and Carbon and Aced might like those last-minute late-registrations, but it comes at a price — it makes for lousy, zero-strategy poker. So far, Merge and its flagship sites have resisted implementing the logical solution, which is to provide a shorter late-registration in specialty formats (with lower numbers of players participating) to stop such stupidities from occurring.
So far, they haven’t fixed the issue, and they didn’t again in this round of MTT restructuring. So while the Carbon and Aced hold’em MTTs are now better for the majority of players, there are some issues still to be addressed. We like the network, and we know some of the problems are aggravated by market conditions, yet the quality of the product itself also has to be considered.
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