Disturbing Trends In Live Poker Tournament Structures

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A trend I find disturbing lately is the increase in fees and rake that casinos are taking from tournaments along with structures that are designed to give players “more play.” A slow structure seems like a wonderful idea, but there comes a point where these structures are not viable, especially with prelim events at tournaments that have a $200 to $500 buy-in. In the case of these tournaments, a slow structure has presented a problem (as rumored with what happened with the WSOP $200 daily deepstack tournaments) to where dealers do not make enough money per down due to the sheer number of downs necessary to complete a tournament. This gives casinos ammunition to raise fees with each tournament to keep them viable.

Currently, $300 tournaments at Venetian are at 291+59, including the dealer bonus and 3% withheld from the prize pool for staff. In 2007, the same tournament was a 300+40 with the dealer bonus. By having the better structure, the tournament requires a longer amount of time to play, which requires more resources including dealer downs. This is needed from the casino’s point of view to keep these tournaments viable.

This increase in fees does a disservice to the players that I feel does not get enough attention. The high amount of fees in proportion to the buyin takes money out of the poker economy faster increasing the skill edge for better players and making it less likely that a less skilled player will win as well as the obvious fact that less money is going back to the players. This has and needlessly continues to accelerate the process that poker players go broke.

I propose that any tournament under a $500 buyin should be done within one day, and $300 buy-ins preferably completed within 8-9 hours. If a tournament director is worried about having an ample amount of play at a final table, he can structure his tournament similar to how Pokerstars structures their Turbo Takedown with an accelerated starting structure and slow ending structure. This decreases the amount of dealer downs needed to administer a tournament and dealers make more money per down.  The amount of play should be proportional to the buy-in, just as the fees are charged in a similar manner. Although some may not be happy if this idea was administered in a widespread manner, it should be better for poker and not worse even if the only good that came of it was that more money stays in the poker economy for an extended period of time.

For the opponents of this idea, imagine a 200 person tournament that takes 12 hours to complete. If you have a slow starting structure, you will eliminate a much smaller percentage of the tables within the first 3 hours than one with a faster start. One half hour that uses 10 tables is the equivalent of using 5 tables for one hour (at 30 minutes per dealer down). I do not know how to precisely compute how quickly tables would break depending on structure, I at least know just quickly thinking about it that eliminating many tables at the beginning would help with the number of dealer downs needed per tournament. Not only do you make more dealers available to deal cash games, you have more of a player pool available to run various satellites later on that same day where with a slow starting structure would occupy much of the potential player pool. Keep in mind that tournaments are not cash games, and that they must come to conclusion within a reasonable amount of time.

One tournament director that I believe does a great job in formulating structures is Matt Savage, who believes that more starting chips and more starting big blinds does not give players more play in a tournament. He believes that such a structure takes away from the amount of play available when the payouts begin to matter (the final table).

I do not think that casinos would roll back the fees they currently charge, but it could very well slow down if not stop the increases in fees that they are starting to levy. We want our tournament fields to continue to be fairly sizeable, and I believe instituting these changes would help immensely.

About Jonathan

Twenty-four-year old professional poker player Jonathan Tamayo is a force to be reckoned with in high stakes tournaments, whether in live play or online where he goes by the username “driverseati.” Read More