Tourney Haxton article on late-reg tourneys (1 Viewer)

[Taghkanic]

The PartyPoker blog has an interesting opinion piece from Ike Haxton about the ideal amount of time that people should be able to late register for tourneys (whether live or online). He also gets into some of the debate about rebuys/re-entries to the extent timing also can be an issue there.

https://problog.partypoker.com/2020...limited-re-entries-and-late-registration.html

Some choice excerpts:

“Although it gets much less discussion [than unlimited reentries], the length of the registration period is, in my view, a consideration of at least equal importance. Party has recently begun to address this issue and we no longer have many tournaments where you can enter with less than 20bb. I’d like to see us go further and get that up to 40bb in most tournaments.”

“I am an enthusiast of short stack poker... but once you get under 10bb or so and virtually every hand involves an open jam that is either called or not, the game becomes quite dull. When you allow entries down to 10bb, it’s not just the last hour or so of the registration period that is taken over by this tedious ultra shallow play.”

“... When you’re starting [late] with 10bb and might play only an orbit or two on average, increasing the average number of hands you play before posting your first big blind is a massive swing, often more significant than any play decision you will have the opportunity to make with such a short stack. Similarly, when posting the big blind costs you around 10% of your chips, the value of stalling to manipulate the timing of blind increases and table breaks is magnified. This kind of gamesmanship is extremely unfun and seriously disadvantages novice or recreational players who don’t know or care to participate in it.”

“Very long re-entry periods penalize the players who play from the start by allowing last minute entries to capitalize on the fact that, by the time they enter, a substantial percentage of the field has already busted and their chances of at least min cashing are accordingly inflated. Modeling these last minute entries with ICM suggests that they are often worth 3-5% ROI, occasionally as much as 10%, just as a reward for waiting until a lot of the field has already busted before entering the tournament. Of course, this edge comes at the expense of the players who are already in the tournament.”

“[If] there are around as many entries at the last minute as there are in total up to that point, this quickly threatens to become an insurmountable penalty for the players who enter in the early and middle stages of the registration period. Indeed, I think this effect has become large enough and well enough known that it sometimes prevents tournaments from getting off the ground in the first place.”

Thoughts? I know that tourney structure/set-up is a topic that often excites debate around here, and I thought Haxton made some good points.

I’m not sure if limiting entries/re-entries to when the buy-in would be 40BB is practical — for my home game, that would be around the end of Level 3, which seems early. But I could see a 20BB or even 30BB time limit making sense.