Tourney Contemplating a poker league (1 Viewer)

Our league used to limit the season finale game to the top X number of players, but we did away with that after the first few years. Now we just have a qualifier where you must attend at least 4 games (we play 14) to play in the final. It's not very fair to those who attend 10+ games and contributed each time and some newbie or someone who infrequently participates and only plays once or twice gets the same shot at the big prize pool.

I like to give points for players for attending to encourage attendance. The more the merrier.
 
T Chan, the way we eliminated that problem was by charging players who hadn't come a "make up" fee. We had 12 games, and each time players contributed $2 to the year end game. For every game fewer than 12 you played, that player's buy-in fee went up by $2. I maybe should have made it $3 so coming to regular games would have more value, but we didn't.
 
T Chan, the way we eliminated that problem was by charging players who hadn't come a "make up" fee. We had 12 games, and each time players contributed $2 to the year end game. For every game fewer than 12 you played, that player's buy-in fee went up by $2. I maybe should have made it $3 so coming to regular games would have more value, but we didn't.

We did that too for a while but ditched it. Sometimes it discouraged players from coming to the final because they had to pay more just because they couldn't make it to some games. I also got some complaints about seeing a lot of new faces at the finale.
 
T Chan, the way we eliminated that problem was by charging players who hadn't come a "make up" fee. We had 12 games, and each time players contributed $2 to the year end game. For every game fewer than 12 you played, that player's buy-in fee went up by $2. I maybe should have made it $3 so coming to regular games would have more value, but we didn't.
A similar approach works well for our group -- there is a minimum number of played events to qualify (>50%), and there is a surcharge for each event short of that minimim. Keeps the regulars happy, and nobody has ever complained about paying their fair share to get a shot at the freeroll.
 
T Chan, one of the reasons I implemented that is from playing in a league where they didn't do that. You had to appear in 8 of the 11, but people complained that those who came to all 11 paid a fair amount more (it was $5 each time) for entry than did those who came to 8. So when I started our league, I fixed. If we'd been charging $5, someone who came to 8 would have to pay an additional $15. If we had allowed anyone to come, those who never came would have paid $55 more.

I did have some people say something, but that was my explanation. You are paying part of the entry as you go. If you didn't make one of the payments, it has to be made up, but there is no penalty. Nobody complained after that explanation. I'd have to look up how many games we required as a minimum. It was more than 0 so everyone who came had come and paid at least once.
 
Yes that absolutely makes sense. I think that's a really good way to run it as it makes everything fair. Sounds like the players like it too.

I went with a different approach for our league where we award extra chips to your season finale starting stack as compensation for attending more games. For each game you attend, you get an extra T1k added to your stack. This is essentially "bought" with your contribution of attending the game, so for those who attend less games they start with less chips. So those who played all or most of the games had no gripe with those who played less. Your starting stack at the season finale is a combination of things including attendance and season points + base chip stack.

Our contribution for each player is $10 per game, so it can be hard for someone in our league to come up with an extra $80-100 if they've only paid a few games which is why I structured it this way. We had some people say the wouldn't come at all since they couldn't make more than 50% of the games, but still had to pay $10 for each game but wouldn't play in the final. It's a hard balance to maintain.
 
I announced at the beginning of the year how it would work. That helped.
 
I am trying to do the same. I'm getting resistance from those who say they can't be there every week.
 

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