Remember when you first started playing poker and you would buy in to a tournament in exchange for a certain number of chips and play until you either busted or won the thing? Yeah, well, that’s no longer the case.
The modern tournament poker scene is chock full of tournaments with snazzy names like Accumulator and Knockouts; and it gets even more complicated online, where we get crazy bird names like 50/50, 3R+1A, Multi-Entry, and Hyper Turbos — because turbos simply weren’t fast enough.
I’m all for diversity in poker, but when these fringe tournaments start to permeate the mainstream, such as with the recent rise in popularity of reentry tournaments, I think it has gone too far.
So my question is this: What was wrong with freezeout tournaments?
The dawn of reentry events
During the Poker Boom, tournaments went from being loss leaders to sources of revenue for casinos. But the Boom ended, and in an effort to maintain the revenue they were suddenly bringing in from tournaments, casinos and tournament directors tried to come up with creative ways to sustain the number of entries they saw during the Poker Boom, and hopefully keep tournaments operating in the black.
This new attitude among tournament organizers is basically, “bigger prize-pools at all costs,” and this attitude brought about formats like reentries; formats that create an illusion about the tournament, making them appear bigger than they actually are. But reentry fields are actually smaller and don’t have the same benefit to the casino.
Why reentries are bad for casinos
The feeling is that the larger the prize-pool for the tournament the more players it will attract, which I suppose is true on some level. But in doing so they lost sight of the reason for tournaments in the first place, as a loss leader.
A loss leader is basically a product that can be offered at below cost because purchasers of said product will buy other products with a higher markup. So why don’t casinos follow this logic anymore?
As the political saying goes, it’s easy to give someone a tax cut, but it’s near impossible to take it away. And for casinos, after making money on poker tournaments they were loath to go back to the old way and use tournaments as a loss leader, even if doing so meant more total revenue. Once they got a taste that tournaments could be profitable that’s all they saw, even if it meant taking away from other parts of the casino to keep tournaments turning a profit!
First of all, reentries mean less players overall, which means less players in the casino compared to the Boom days, and as Matt Savage pointed out in his excellent column on this subject, the players are less likely to go sit in a cash game or head to another part of the casino, since they can just fire another bullet.
I’m not sure if the original thinking was that people had grown disillusioned with poker and needed something new, or that events like reentries could somehow mask the dwindling attendance numbers, but whatever the original reason was it has pretty much gone out the window. Apparently nobody ever considered that the tournament numbers we saw in 2005 and 2006 simply weren’t sustainable; that there were simply no measures we could enact to recreate the heyday of the Poker Boom.
Yes, you could take advantage of poker tournaments as a revenue stream during a small window of time, but in the end you had to be willing to go back to the old way of doing things, and let tournaments be the attractant for other areas of the casino.
In my opinion, tournaments would be far better off by dropping the buy-in amount. We simply don’t need 100+ tournaments every year with buy-ins of $5k and up. If Casinos went back to using tournaments as the loss leader they are, they could drop these buy-ins to UKIPT or HPT levels and bring in thousands of additional players.
The events wouldn’t be as “glamorous” but they would be better for the overall economy of the poker room. Here are three reasons why.
Reason #1: Freezeouts are simpler to manage
The reentry event at the 2012 WSOP had all kinds of issues, and more recently people have pointing ways players can exploit some of these structures. And let’s not overlook how adding reentries to a tournament adds to the already worked to the bone tournament staff’s burdens.
Going a step farther, Allen Kessler made a few hypothetical points regarding tournaments where a player can enter on multiple days and takes their largest stack into Day 2 (a bastardized version of a reentry) on his Facebook page:
Advancing stacks with even one less chip than a previous flight result have virtually no value, so …
A player may have a stack that would not exceed their first stack, and can decide to smuggle a portion of it into the already advancing flight to add to their total.
A player may have a number of chips that won’t surpass their first flight and agree with another player to lose most of those chips to them in an upcoming pot.
A player may have a number of chips that needs to be quadrupled to exceed prior advancing stack and announces that he’s “going all in blind” for the next several hands in order to build a stack greater than their previous one. (This actually happened with Kara Scott at a recent wpt playground poker main event).
Reason #2: Freezeouts are easy to understand
If we want casual players to once again populate the seats at our poker tables (tournaments and cash games alike) we need to make the waters inviting, and nothing says “welcome aboard” quite like an easy to explain format. Like a beach that has had shark sightings, a simple sign with the universal picture of a shark will do; everyone gets that; everyone knows what it means; just like everyone understands what “here are your chips you play until you bust” means.
What we currently have is the equivalent of a sign that says:
Over the past 246 months there have been 19 shark sightings, 1 known attack, and 4-6 unverified attacks. 79% of the sightings occurred between sunrise and sunset, and 72% of the potential attacks occurred after sundown. In the previous 20 years to this period there were only 6 total sightings and no known attacks.
Reason #3: Freezeouts are fair to everyone
I don’t know why a tournament’s success is measured by the number of entries and the prize-pool instead of the quality and fairness of the event, but that’s what seems to have happened, and what we have is an endless parade of reentry tournaments to keep these numbers up.
Instead of debating the potential edges pros have in reentry events can’t we just use the tried and true freezeout formula? A formula that is as fair to the pro as it is to the amateur, and one that has proven to work.
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