Unlimited Reentries are Slowly Killing Tournament Poker

If you have followed my past musings on this topic you know reentries have been in my crosshairs for quite some time, and I’m of the opinion that while reentries have helped in the short-term to keep prize-pools up they are now doing more doing more damage than they are worth.

Before I get into the meat of this column, let me just say that I’m not against all reentry events.

I have no issue with players who bust on Day 1a being allowed to reenter on a secondary starting day. The reason I’m ok with this is because everyone on that starting flight starts the day the same and their day ends the same.

Basically, a person reentering doesn’t impact the rest of the field on that particular flight. Someone can’t be busted and then reenter and bust you, so I’m ok with reentries on separate starting days.

Here is what I’m not ok with.

Reentries skew the outcome and decision making process

Part of a poker tournament is the finality of it all, especially during the opening levels. If you guess wrong or get unlucky your day is over, and you have nothing to show for it. Because of this the early stages of a tournament are generally played cautiously, even by the top pros in many instances; there is a feeling out process and it’s just human nature to not want to plunk down $10,000 and play for six minutes.

But with reentries this is not the case –well, it is the case of you’re a regular Joe who won their way into the tournament via a satellite or who gets to play in one or two WPT tournaments each year if they’re lucky– because you’re still in cautious mode.

For pros this finality of their early decision is no longer an issue, and a very important and critical part of the decision (am I going to get eliminated if I make this bluff and get called?) no longer exists. If you bust you just reenter.

You can say it’s fair because everyone can reenter, but this is obviously not the case. please try to explain how fair it is to the player who makes $40,000 a year and who won a seat into the WPT Championship online? Hey buddy, if you bust just go reenter for $15,000!

Here is an over the top example of what I’m talking about:

Imagine if I devised a tournament structure with a $10,000 buy-in where everyone gets 10,000 chips, but you can also take an add-on at the first break. The add-on costs $10,000,000 and you get 100,000,000 chips.

It’s fair because anyone can do it, just pay the $10 million, so what are you complaining about?

Do reentry events benefit the pros? Yes and no

As I’ve discussed in the past, there is also a stigma associated with reentry events, a stigma that makes casual players feel as if they are at an even further disadvantage to the pros. Whether this is true or not doesn’t really matter, because perception is often reality, and for casual players the perception is that reentry events benefit the pros.

Furthermore, reentries may not improve the ROI of the person who is reentering (this is debatable), but they do hurt the ROI of the average player who is not able to reenter and here is why.

Reentries may add to the total prize-pool, but a mediocre player (a -20% ROI) gets far less of the added equity than the player reentering and every superior player that reenters further drops their ROI, which I would argue cannot be offset by the additional money in the prize-pool.

So when you have a guy luckbox his way into a big stack and there should be 50 players left, with 45 making the money, but because of reentries there are 100 players remaining and they are almost all pro players, this luckbox is still a long shot to make the money.

Final thoughts

My feeling is that reentry events are little more than an olive branch to pro players, allowing them to fade one or two bad beats and still have a chance to compete in the tournament, which is a complete contradiction of how tournaments are presented to the average player.

The average player knows they are at a disadvantage but a tournament is supposed to be the great equalizer; just cooler Daniel Negreanu or put a bad beat on Phil Ivey and you’ve eliminated them… but that’s not the case anymore and the amateur player knows it and simply doesn’t enter anymore.

Now factor in the deepstacks and slower structures and how much of a chance does a player really have to luckbox their way to a final table?

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