Tourney Help Me Come Up With a Good Points Structure for a Tournament League (1 Viewer)

JMC9389

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Per the title.

I'm planning on doing something fun with the tournaments I have next year with a crew that usually likes to play cash. Cash games are cash games, buy in, rebuy, reload, repeat. Tournaments to me now, I'm finding, a lot more fun than cash games. There are so many variations in strategy that can be used based on the structure (freeze out, rebuys, bounties, progressive bounties, et al) of the game.

I'm having a hard time coming up with a fair points system, though. With that in mind, I want to reward the following:

1. Attendance. I don't want to be punitive towards those that can't make it, but I do want to reward those that come to play.

2. Knockouts. I'd like to reward action by awarding points for knockouts and tournaments with bounties

3. Rebuys. I'd like for chronic rebuyers to be punitively impacted. Rebuy more, get less points or get docked points.

4. Placements/cashing. This one is obvious. If you cash, you get points based on your place.

That's about all I can think of really.

I'm ambitiously looking to hold 12 tournaments next year in 2021. All dependent on a lot of things. COVID, player availability, etc. Realistically, we'll probably get in between 8 to 10 games, and I'm going to offer up prizes to the top players at the end of the year (poker swag, card set ups, dealer buttons, maybe a nice single chip for a card guard, and trophies for the top 3 finishers on the year).

As far as the structure of the games themselves, I'm looking to have a mix of games and layouts. I'm looking to have about 50% standard T10000 tournaments with rebuys and bounties, maybe one or two T20000 tournaments with rebuys and bounties, and three "majors" per year like in golf with the Masters, US Open, British Open, PGA Championship, you get the idea. One around Memorial Day, another around Labor Day, and the last right around Christmas that will be deep stack tournaments. Do you all think it would mess with a point structure to have the "majors" counted with double the amount of points? I want to give the "majors" a big game feel and to make it matter a bit more than the others.

Let me know what you think!

Joe
 
Joe! Really great idea.

1. To incentivize attendance without penalizing those who are unable to attend, make attendance worth little in the grand scheme of things. In line with your later thinking, do not make majors worth double, but do provide opportunities for players to earn points. Keep in mind that the nature of a points system rewards involvement, which necessitates attendance.
2. This is very work-intensive to track if you do not already do so. Using bounty buttons would work and players could redeem them for points instead of cash.
3. I don't think that this is a good idea due to the nature of the game, it's up to a player in order to win or lose money. You don't want a points system to dominate love of the game. Have this value around equal to the value of your attendance.
4. This is dependent on how many players are in a tournament. Regardless, award points only for placing, not cashing, since adding points to cashing will inventive nitty play around and on the bubble.

Here might be an example of a points system -
Attendance: 1
Knockout: 5
1st: 15
2nd: 10
3rd: 5
Rebuy: -2

Note on larger tournaments is you can place a larger points emphasis (+30%) on placing. This is how you can give majors a big game feel without completely devaluing regular games.

Whenever points are involved, remember to announce weekly who is in the lead and their point amount. It's up to you how you want to disclose how the system works, but at least announcing names fosters a sense of competition.


My two cents!
 
We did a league last year, went off pretty well but people decided they wanted to do cash games instead. I went through PCF threads discussing this topic, and passed my ideas along to my players to see if they would like the ideas I had for the league premise.

What I set up for points was 1st place gets points in the amount who is in that tournament, ex. 10, 2nd place gets 9, etc, all the way to last place getting one point. Also for those in the money they get additional points: ex. 3rd gets +2, 2nd gets +4, 1st gets +6.

For rebuys, I limited them for one rebuy per player. Also would deduct one point for the rebuy for that tournament.

For busts, the previous League guy played in had it to where the person who bust a person gets one point added today's score per tournament.

At the end of the year, the top five people who earn the most points qualify for the end of the year main event, so it helped people give incentive to come and play well. You could do yours as either a free roll or slightly higher buyin than the regular tournaments.

It went well, but like I said people got burned out of tournaments and wanted to do cash games instead, especially those who started playing cash more during / after the tournaments (which was somewhat my ulterior motive, but thankful for either way ;)).

Hope this helps.

Hope this helps
 
Thank you for your reply @StatTracker ! Certainly a great place to start! To counter each counterpoint you made:

1. Agree. One has to come and play to earn points. Obviously I want people to come and play, but I just don't want it negatively affecting them if they can't come once or twice. I've seen some leagues laid out as such that deduct points for not coming. That's rubbish.

2. I should say that I have Tournament Director software that will help me out with keeping track of knockouts, rebuys, etc. I'll be able to copy and paste the results of each game to a Word Document and upload them to our Facebook group that I made for the game. I'll be keeping track of points that way too.

3. Accounting for rebuys in the points system adds a strategic element to the league. If you're behind by a lot of points, it may be worth the gamble to rebuy, but it risks losing more points if one can't place and get some of the points back. Those towards the top of the standings have less to gain by rebuying, especially late in the "season ", but they also risk other players catching them.

4. Agree with awarding points based on placing rather than cashing. Some points will be awarded with a 4th or 5th place finish, for example, but not as much as with a 1st or 2nd place finish. For the "major" games, I think increasing points by 25% for placement only is good enough to incenitivize the big games. Points for knockouts if there are bounties would stay the same.

The layout you proposed for points is a great start. I'll maybe make knockouts worth a little less, maybe 3 points instead of 5, to make actual placement worth more in the long run. All of the other values look perfect otherwise!
 
Here is what we use in our league. We run the points from Jan - Dec with a variety of tournament structures. We also started adding 15 points per person for attendance.
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We did a league last year, went off pretty well but people decided they wanted to do cash games instead. I went through PCF threads discussing this topic, and passed my ideas along to my players to see if they would like the ideas I had for the league premise.

What I set up for points was 1st place gets points in the amount who is in that tournament, ex. 10, 2nd place gets 9, etc, all the way to last place getting one point. Also for those in the money they get additional points: ex. 3rd gets +2, 2nd gets +4, 1st gets +6.

For rebuys, I limited them for one rebuy per player. Also would deduct one point for the rebuy for that tournament.

For busts, the previous League guy played in had it to where the person who bust a person gets one point added today's score per tournament.

At the end of the year, the top five people who earn the most points qualify for the end of the year main event, so it helped people give incentive to come and play well. You could do yours as either a free roll or slightly higher buyin than the regular tournaments.

It went well, but like I said people got burned out of tournaments and wanted to do cash games instead, especially those who started playing cash more during / after the tournaments (which was somewhat my ulterior motive, but thankful for either way ;)).

Hope this helps.

Hope this helps
Definitely does help to see all of the different perspectives!

We'll be playing cash games too. I have at least one cash game on the docket for every tournament we have. I'm optimistically looking to host 25 events next year with 12 of them tournaments to get all of my chip sets in action. In reality, probably 20 of the events will end up happening of there are no COVID cancelations.

I think that you and stattracker agree on lots of what you both posted, but I tend to agree with his point distribution set up a bit more. If I'm already giving points for placement, it doesn't make much sense to give points for cashing too, as the same people are going to be padding their scores by finishing top 3. I like the idea of deducting points for a rebuy and awarding for a knockout. Making a knockout worth more than a rebuy promotes action and will keep more people playing, I think.
 
I like simple to calculate point systems. Screw any system using decimals or requiring the use of square roots. I also strongly dislike any system that gives 19th more points than 20th. Really, what does it matter, when those players never even sat at the same table?

Our current point system is simple.
  • FInish out of the money get 1 point.
  • Winner gets 1 point for each player's buy-in and rebuy
  • Second gets 70% (rounded to the nearest integer) of the 1st place score
  • Third gets 60% (rounded to the nearest integer) of the 1st place score
  • Fourth gets 50% (rounded to the nearest integer) of the 1st place score, provided 4th was a paid position.
  • Fifth gets 40% (rounded to the nearest integer) of the 1st place score, provided 5th was a paid position.
  • Sixth gets 30% (rounded to the nearest integer) of the 1st place score, provided 6th was a paid position.
This would be easy to modify to discourage rebuys by subtracting some amount for a rebuy, but I like to encourage "play" for our player of the year, so I would never deduct a point for rebuying.

This system also encourages playing to get in the money - the real goal of poker, right? I would hate to see a race at the end of the season where a player just folded into the championship slot by finishing 12th.

Our typical game has about 16 players,and 5 rebuys; 21 points for the win. The attendance/out of the money points only add up to a small fraction of the total score, but can make a difference.

We also host the occasional cash game. The top money earners earn points as if it were a tournament.
 
I like simple to calculate point systems. Screw any system using decimals or requiring the use of square roots. I also strongly dislike any system that gives 19th more points than 20th. Really, what does it matter, when those players never even sat at the same table?

Our current point system is simple.
  • FInish out of the money get 1 point.
  • Winner gets 1 point for each player's buy-in and rebuy
  • Second gets 70% (rounded to the nearest integer) of the 1st place score
  • Third gets 60% (rounded to the nearest integer) of the 1st place score
  • Fourth gets 50% (rounded to the nearest integer) of the 1st place score, provided 4th was a paid position.
  • Fifth gets 40% (rounded to the nearest integer) of the 1st place score, provided 5th was a paid position.
  • Sixth gets 30% (rounded to the nearest integer) of the 1st place score, provided 6th was a paid position.
This would be easy to modify to discourage rebuys by subtracting some amount for a rebuy, but I like to encourage "play" for our player of the year, so I would never deduct a point for rebuying.

This system also encourages playing to get in the money - the real goal of poker, right? I would hate to see a race at the end of the season where a player just folded into the championship slot by finishing 12th.

Our typical game has about 16 players,and 5 rebuys; 21 points for the win. The attendance/out of the money points only add up to a small fraction of the total score, but can make a difference.

We also host the occasional cash game. The top money earners earn points as if it were a tournament.
This I like a lot too. All of my tournaments are going to end up STT's with between 6 to 8 players. I'm limiting events to 8 due to COVID anyway. Only three will get paid out with this amount of players.

So say in a 6 player STT in which there are 10 total buy ins and rebuys combined, 1st would get 10 points, 2nd place 7 points, and 3rd place 6 points.

But in a 8 player STT with 12 total buy ins and rebuys, 1st gets 12 points, 2nd gets 8 points, and 3rd gets 7 points. It's harder to cash and to win a 8 player tourney than a 6 player tourney, and the extra points given reward that.

If I do that and add a point for attendace, I'm in business I think. I just take the raw numbers at the end of the "major" games I want to have and multiply that by 25% to give them a bit more weight.
 
If I do that and add a point for attendace, I'm in business I think. I just take the raw numbers at the end of the "major" games I want to have and multiply that by 25% to give them a bit more weight.
We do the same. Most of our events are $20, but the last game of the year is $30 (no rebuys) and it is worth more points because of it. Our final game this year (our 100th event) will be $50, putting even more weight on it - however, we really wanted to make the 100th an event not to be missed, so the extra points there are warranted.
 
JMC, I’m going to address your original questions on [1] attendance, [2] Kos, [3] rebuys, and [4] placement/cashing. I ran a league for a few years, but we abandoned it. However, I’ve continued to look at ways to measure players as we do give out some awards based on performance. I’m also just very interested in ways you evaluate something like poker players who don’t all play the same number of games, don’t all start at the same time, etc. I’ll start with a little philosophy (it’s mine).

Edited when I realized I mixed a system I looked at with the system I actually decided on for this year.

In baseball, there are 162 games. That’s a long season, and it’s enough to truly evaluated teams. But different parks play differently. It’s a long enough season to measure park differences. In the NFL, there are only 16 games. In college football, there are 12-13 (now counting 2020). The BCS has introduced us to the “13th datapoint” concept. At least they think 13 games gives a better measure than 12, and generally I agree, but I don’t think that means simply playing 13 games makes a team better. They do apparently believe that when it’s close.

Golf and car racing don’t have the same number of events per player. Car racing has racers in different positions, and that’s because it would be impossible to have 30+ racers in a round track and have everything be equal in position. In golf, a guy in theory could start 5 hours later than another and still compare them, even though the first guy might have played when it was colder and the ball didn’t travel as far and the second guy played when it was windier and perhaps even raining a bit. These two sports don’t truly have championship events.

Poker has more variables than all of those sports. To me, I think the more things you can find a way to effectively measure, the better your system is. Some things are easier to measure than others though. It’s “championship” event, if there is one, is the WSOP Main Event. It crowns a “world champion,” but in theory someone could enter only 1 poker tournament and win it. An NFL team couldn’t play one game and it be the Super Bowl.

BG has some good ideas on this, and a lot of league experience. He and I agree on way more than we disagree on. Hopefully he will chime in here.

On ratios, I’m a believer in having a consistent ratio between places. The more people you measure, the more I think that matters. There are plenty of ways you could set points and measure the number of players most of us are trying to measure.

Attendance
It seems to me there are 2 aspects of this. The first is how many games a player attends and the second is field size.

I say if one attends, they get something just for showing up. I’ll use 3 tables of 10 since that would be our max. I’d give every attendee 1 point. That one point is multiplied by field size. I start with 10 = 1.0. I’ve tried 3 things. Then they receive that number of points for attending. Field size divided by 10 is the multiplier. At 40-50 players, I’ve not run a scenario where this made a difference in our top players, but I don’t think that is the best way to do it. What I don’t like about 20/10 is for attending a 20-player tournament, you receive 2x as many points as a 10-player tournament, and 3x for 30. I’m not convinced that is right. As the field size increases, the differences become smaller and smaller.

BG introduced me some years ago to a percentage increase for each additional player in the field. At the time, he used a 4% increase for each additional player. He has also used 5%. Thus, if 10 = 1, for 11 players, the attendances points I’d give are either 1.04 or 1.05.

The reason I measure attendance with some kind of points is because it makes it possible to measure all players who attend. I personally am only looking to find our top 3-5 players, but I’d like that to be as accurate as possible.

I think 1.04 or 1.05 are both good numbers. However, this number must be considered in light of other scoring.

Knockouts
I think knockouts (KOs) is a skill, but it’s hard to measure. I’ll compare this to outfielders in baseball. Those who throw out more runners on the bases have better arms. But over a short run, that might not be the case. The percentage of runners thrown out per attempt is not a good measure because the better arms might be trying to throw out way more, but get fewer of them because a guy with a lesser arm isn’t trying the more difficult ones. There are so many variations of possibilities, it’s hard to truly measure beyond raw numbers.

It's hard to measure a quality KO in poker. There’s a huge difference between putting 10% of your chip stack at risk to put someone all in and putting 98%, where losing the hand would not knock you out, but would cripple you. It’s not the same KOing a guy who just got crippled in a bad beat vs. a guy who has frittered his chips away through sloppy play. But the KO counts the same.

I tracked this for a while with our league. We only had one year where altering the amount of credit given for KOs would have made a material difference in an award, and it wasn’t our top award. In that case, the scoring for that would only have made #3 the #2 in a category. So I found it difficult to measure where it made a difference.

My advice: I’d throw that out. As much as I played with it, I didn’t find that to be helpful in determining our best players. I did find it helpful to know that as a rule, better players have more KOs, but there are a lot of possible reasons for that. We have one player who rarely KOs anyone, but he consistently survives until late in the tournament. Survival is a skill too. His low number of KOs never altered his ending position, regardless of how much I counted KOs. But he also wasn’t at the very tops.

Rebuys
These are hard to measure as well. It seems to make sense that a rebuy counts as much as an original buy-in, but I don’t believe it does. A guy shouldn’t only get credit for where he finishes divided by buy-ins. I think if you are going to measure this, it shouldn’t be 1:1. Maybe a way to do it, I’m experimenting with this and don’t yet know how it will work. And COVID has caused us to cancel 5 games of our scheduled 14, so it will be a while before I really know. But I’ll share my thoughts.

I toyed around with an adjustment based on $5 increments. For each additional $5 on the rebuys, I’ve played with an adjustment of 1.5%, 2%, 3%, and 4%. Obviously you could do something similar for $10. We have a mix of mostly freeze outs but some rebuys. I applied these rules to past years. In our short seasons and relative low buy-ins ($35 currently for most games, but double that for 1 game), I found with a $60 buy-in at 4%, a guy who rebuys would have his final score adjusted by only 16.4% if you went by $5, or 8.5% if you went by $10.

Again, I don’t know for sure, but I think this ratio needs to be matched up with other ratios. I played with this concept on last year’s results. It didn’t change any slots near the top, which is really the only place I care about. I really don’t care if it changes from about it if it changes #10 and #11. At that point, I’m not measuring our best players.

One of your questions is should the 4 big events count twice as much. I don’t think so. I’d count them by some type of ratio above. I have 1 big event with a 2x buy-in that is also a re-entry event; 3 other rebuy events with the rest being freeze outs, and one event this year that will be a special amount – not quite 1.5x our buy-in. That is now looking like it will coincide with our big social event of the year, so I’m not sure yet how that will work. But, I have a formula to determine how to calculate the amount of buy-ins so that my biggest events will count for more, and rebuys will hurt a little, but not proportionally to the total buy-in. If next year is normal, ask me in about 1.5 years how I think it worked.

Placement/cashing
You put these together, but I’m going to bifurcate them.

If your finish points are identical to the payouts, you can put them together. For a lot of reasons, I don’t do that. I have a higher percentage of low payouts – either just getting their money back or a little more for the lowest spots. I do that because I’ve found it is easier to keep players who are consistent donators if they do sometimes cash. The fact that they cashed and won a little something is more important to them than their overall results. Thus, our payouts are top-loaded and at lower numbers of players, I pay out a higher percentage of the field. My lowest payout is determined by the number of players it takes to pay out one more spot where the last paid spot gets their money back. Some look at it as if they paid, but get anything back, they won. That’s not wrong; it’s just not how I do it.

I went from 10 at the tables to 9 last year, but I’ll use 10 so you can see the scoring.
Make the final table, and you get 1.6x the points as a guy who didn’t.
The top 6 spots each get 60% more, or 1.6x, the spot below.
11 = 1.0
10 = 1.6
9 = 1.6
8 = 1.6
7 = 1.6
6 = 2.560
5 = 4.096
4 = 6.554
3 = 10.486
2 = 16.777
1 = 26.844

In short, you get extra points for making the final table, but the final 6 get additional points. I do that regardless of the number of payouts, which varies from 3 to 6 for up to 27 players.

The problem with going by payouts instead of finishes is that it skews results between tournaments where there were only 3 payouts vs. one with 6 payouts. Thus, the final 6 are treated, in terms of scores, like we always payout 6 slots. However, when combined with attendance, one does better with a large field than a small field.

To further complicate this, I normally have 9 players at each table. Attendance at our 4 games this year has been 18, 14, 9, and 9. The last one was June, where I only allowed 7 per table for COVID. So do I count the 2 who didn’t make the final table like I normally do, or do I count them like I did our 3rd tournament where it was treated like all made the final table? I chose to do treat it like all made the final table based on attendance, but I prefer to score based on what actually happened.

Zombie’s System
I like some of the ideas Zombie has, even if I probably won’t take time to play with them. By the time that would be helpful to me, I’ll have to remember to email him and ask for a recap. I might be 2 years before I relook at this simply because this year is so weird.

What I do when possible is take other systems and apply it to our group for a year, then compare the results. I do agree with him that if you want to encourage rebuys, deducting points might discourage that. I think both of us have a big tournament that anyone can attend. We don’t have a championship game or a tournament of champions event.

I also think his finishes, and he uses 6 places like I do, are in the acceptable range. While the points use smaller percentages as they go up, a concept I don’t hate but don’t particularly like, I think it likely wouldn’t matter in terms of end results for the number of players I’m trying to evaluate.

I agree with his concept that playing to get in the money being an objective. One difference between our games is he I think has all rebuys, but we don’t. And I have some that are technically reentry events and not rebuy events.

I agree with StatTracker’s thoughts, though I’d do it a little differently than he suggests on the finish points. His appears to be a linear system, and I don’t like those. He does make a great point that ratios between things like attendance, KOs, and points are important. I’ll give my thoughts at the end.

Final Thoughts
I ask people what they are trying to measure and why they are trying to measure it. I think you have laid that out. That makes answering your questions much easier to me.

To me, attendance counts for something. In our case 1 x total attendance.

I don’t count KOs, but have counted them as much as 20% of the total score.

Finish points, +60% for each additional slot, and +60% for making the final table. That rewards making the final table (FT). However, the smaller the number of players, the less valuable it is to make the FT. It is not possible for someone in our system though to attend 14 games and never get in the final 6 and beat a guy who came once and won.

Rebuys count the same way attendance does, but based on either $5 or $10 increments. I’m using $5. So a $60 buy in and a rebuy for a total of $120 would basically count 1.5% more for each additional $5, or 12 x 1.04 per time. However, I won’t do that calculation until the end of the year. That’s important for the example below.

Here would be a formula based on my thoughts:
(A) Attendance = 1.0 x Total Attendance Factor
(FP) Finish points
Formula for FP -- A (Attendance x Attendance Factor) x Place Points (see chart above)
(BI) Buy-ins and Rebuys = 1 or 10%, but based on increments of $5 at 4% increase for each additional $5.
A x FP / BI = Pts

If I added KOs, it would probably be the same as attendance and/or buy-ins.

Here is an example our Main Event, 18 players, and a re-entry event. At the end of the rebuy period, players had the option of trading in their existing chip stack for a new one by re-entering and effectively starting over. It was weird that we had no true re-entries. In a re-entry, a player doesn’t have to decide to re-enter immediately, and they draw for a seat. They are unlikely to get their same seat back. For a player turning in their chips and getting a fresh stack, they keep their seat. One player chose that option, so that made 19 buy-ins. She actually chopped for 1st place. I’ll use the players by a letter, and their final score for the event. To the far right in bold, italics, and underlined is what the payout would have been without a chop. There were 63 BB left in the game, and in 5 minutes, that would have been down to 38 BB. The spread between BB left at the chop was approximately 23/20/20. At that point, it was a luckfest. Players chopped because of the differences in scheduled payouts.
Note: In our Main Event, the BI was not calculated. I anticipate calculating the BI at the end of the year for all events, and will see whether that makes a material difference in our top players. Therefore scores for the Main Event don’t reflect that factor.

1st A $430 cash, $290 profit – 25.670 pts. (reentered, so actually paid $140; all others paid $70) -- $520
1st B $350 cash, $280 profit – 25.670 pts. -- $390
1st C $350 cash, $280 profit – 25.670 pts. -- $220

Formula for 1-3 – A x FP = Pts
(38.207 + 23.879 +14.925)/3 or 25.670 for each of the 3 chopped places


4th D $120 cash, $50 profit – 9.328 pts.
5th E $80 cash, $10 profit – 5.830 pts.
6th F $0 cash – 3.644 pts.
7th-9th G/H/I $0 cash – 2.277 pts.
10th-18th All others -- $0 cash – 1.423 pts.

B and C had slightly different chip amounts at the chop, but it was less than 1 BB. In fact, if you averaged them, they had the same rounded number of BBs. A had more than either by about 15%. Because she had bought in 2x, B & C agreed to effectively give her the second $70 back, and then reward her with $10 more for having the largest chip stack at the chop. The payouts amounts between her and B and C were much bigger than the difference between chip stacks. Basically two players who over time have proven to be better players than her agreed to this rather than risk going home with less.

I think the agreed payouts make great sense because all profited at better than third place money, but not quite at 2nd place money. Had the lady who rebought finished 3rd, she would have had an $80 profit instead of a $290 profit. The other two could have had swings of up to $300, and it seemed unlikely to last more than another 20-40 minutes.

I think the point chop makes sense. To me, when players do this, they are stopping the war by armistice, not annihilation or surrender. All three can claim to be the champion; all got a nice profit for the just under 5 hours of play for the buy-in.
 
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You might find my old structure to be of interest. Go to www.xhost.org, and take a look at "2012 Series Rules", "2012 Series Standings", and "Game Statistics".
I used that structure for a number of years with no problems.

Have fun!
 
So this is the formula I ended up using - I think you and I had very similar desires.

=ROUND(((((TOTALPLAYERS-PLAYERPLACE)^2.2)/TOTALPLAYERS+1)+BOUNTIES*0.5)^(1-(0.05*REBUYS)),2)

Got me the results I desired like...
1st place with two rebuys ended up with slightly less points than second place with none, with same amount of bounties
Players who busted earlier on but knocked out a few folks at least get a little credit
Attendance gets something compared to not attendance, but scale is still logarithmic overall

Can send you my spreadsheet if you are interested.
 
Thank you for your input everyone! Especially @TexRex , I know you put in a lot of time and effort into your post!

I think there is a lot of common ground in all of the responses and rules/regulations that I read in this thread and reading around the boards.

That being said, I think @Poker Zombie 's rules are the best way to go about my game in particular. Simple, to the point, and not too many number crunching. It works nicely for what are going to be single table tournaments with mostly 6, sometimes 7, and rarely 8 or 9 players. They also align with what I want to reward. Attendance and placement to add a competitive edge. Reward those that come and play regularly, as those 8 to 10 points may end up making the difference between a 1st and 2nd place finish at the end of the year. But at the same time, there's no punitive action taken if someone can't make it once or twice.

Most of the tournaments are going to be with rebuys and bounties. I figure that the financial aspect of having a bounty will be incentive enough to create action. For a $10 buy in, of which $5 goes into a bounty, that's $5 and half of your buy in back in your pocket if you knock someone out. Lots of knock outs does not always equal results. Last tournament I played, I knocked zero players out but finished 2nd in a field of 8. Awarding points based on placement (the idea is to win, after all!) is the way to go I think.

As far as awarding more points for "major" games, I think that a 25% bump in the usual points awarded is fair enough. It adds a little extra reward for winning the big games but doesn't necessarily make or break someone to make the usual games be insignificant.

This is what I think I'm going for:

No show: 0 points
Placement other than top 3: 1 point
3rd place: 60% of total buy-ins and rebuys, rounded to the nearest whole number
2nd place: 70% of total buy-ins and rebuys, rounded to the nearest whole number
1st place: 100% of total buy-ins and rebuys

Majors: 25% increase in total awarded points for 1st through 3rd place.

Example: Major tournament with 8 players, and 4 buy-ins for a total of 12 buy-ins will be awarded on the following:

1st: 12 x 0.25= 3 additional points= 15 total points
2nd: 12 * 0.7= 8.4, rounded = 8 points x 0.25= 2 additional points= 10 total points
3rd: 12 * 0.6= 7.2, rounded = 7 points x 0.25=1.75 additional points rounded up to 2=9 total points
 
I like simple to calculate point systems. Screw any system using decimals or requiring the use of square roots. I also strongly dislike any system that gives 19th more points than 20th. Really, what does it matter, when those players never even sat at the same table?

Our current point system is simple.
  • FInish out of the money get 1 point.
  • Winner gets 1 point for each player's buy-in and rebuy
  • Second gets 70% (rounded to the nearest integer) of the 1st place score
  • Third gets 60% (rounded to the nearest integer) of the 1st place score
  • Fourth gets 50% (rounded to the nearest integer) of the 1st place score, provided 4th was a paid position.
  • Fifth gets 40% (rounded to the nearest integer) of the 1st place score, provided 5th was a paid position.
  • Sixth gets 30% (rounded to the nearest integer) of the 1st place score, provided 6th was a paid position.
This would be easy to modify to discourage rebuys by subtracting some amount for a rebuy, but I like to encourage "play" for our player of the year, so I would never deduct a point for rebuying.

This system also encourages playing to get in the money - the real goal of poker, right? I would hate to see a race at the end of the season where a player just folded into the championship slot by finishing 12th.

Our typical game has about 16 players,and 5 rebuys; 21 points for the win. The attendance/out of the money points only add up to a small fraction of the total score, but can make a difference.

We also host the occasional cash game. The top money earners earn points as if it were a tournament.
I also like the simplicity of this system and might implement it, or something very similar, myself.

I've been using HomePokerSystem to keep track of tournament results but we've never officially had a league, it was more to just have an easy overview of things like number of wins, player attendance and, the one everybody is really most interested in, cash winnings.

That said, whenever I input results I do fill in the box for points, really just for the sake of it, and I've used the simple but completely inadequate reverse field size, ie winner of a 7 handed tournament gets 7 points, 2nd gets 6, 3rd gets 4 and so on. It was more of a placemarker system than anything else and, like I say, we never officially started a league.

Back to your system, I know you say you don't like to penalise rebuys but, let's say a guy rebuys 10 times and wins and the other 9 guys don't rebuy at all. Does he get 20 points and 2nd place gets 14? I'm not sure how I feel about that... but maybe that's a problem with that rebuy structure and not the points system?

Reason I ask is because although practically all my tourneys are limited to 1 rebuy, my last was unlimited and the winner rebought over and over and over, to the point he rebought a few times back to back for around 1BB, went all in and eventually got lucky on the flip, then had a good enough run to knock out the remaining 2 players. His total buy-in + rebuys was 8. I came second and my total was 1. Using your points he would get 24 points and I'd get 17. Trying to decide if I like that or not, and maybe unlimited rebuys was a terrible thing generally but as I said in my thread about it at the time people loved it, the novelty was good and I cant deny that it was a bit of manic fun, so I'll more than likely do it again next year.

One other thing I'm curious about is if I should award points for bounties and/or knockouts. You could have a situation where a player knocks out the first few players but still finishes mid-to-low, while the guy who wins only knocks out second place. Do you think points should reflect that in any way?
 
Joe, I certainly get the sentiment regarding re-buys, but they aren't all the same. Where a player is limited to 1 re-buy, unless he gets KO'd early, he's typically buying in for way for way fewer BB than when he started, and he's typically buying a stack that is smaller than the average stack. Using the example of 10 players with 1 re-buy, I don't honestly think the one re-buy coming back to win indicates a problem. But I agree if he re-bought 10 times, that's a problem. In your hypo, he's put in 10/19 of the money. If that's actually profitable for him, I think the problem is the payout structure first, and the re-buy structure second. And both are problems, IMHO.

I've found most players want re-buys limited to 1, or sometimes 2. Players are in different economic situations. The deepest pocket buying winnings by re-buys others can't afford can kill a game. I've seen that happen. We had secondary tournaments for a while. It was a cheap $5 buy-in and re-buy. I had 2 players repeatedly re-buy. One of them, on his last re-buy, was re-buying in hopes of losing less money. I implemented a single re-buy rule for the secondary tournament, but no one has played since that night.

Most of ours are freeze-outs. In some, we do allow one re-buy, but the time is limited to the point where we think it is no more than halfway through. We have a large starting stack (400 BB), but our blinds increase by 50-67% every time, averaging about 58%. There are plenty of good structures out there. One thing I like about ours is that it naturally discourages re-buys. A guy who re-buys in R3 is getting way fewer starting chips.

As I said above, our formula reduces by 1.5% the final score for every extra $5. I've toyed with 2%, 3%, and 4%. I think anything over that penalizes too much. It makes some difference on a single re-buy, but not that much. I don't think a 1:1 ratio is truly reflects the skill required to win. My personal re-buy rule is if I feel like I'm playing well, but basically got unlucky, I'll re-buy if either the BB allow me to be competitive, or one case where they were paying 3, I got KO'd when I was effectively re-buying 2nd place money with 4 left because I was about 2 deal and 2 guys in front of me would both be paying blinds taking their stack well below mine. I just took advantage of what I thought were stupid re-buy rules. On the other hand, if I played poorly, I don't re-buy and just concede I had a bad night, so don't make it worse.

I tracked KOs for several years. I used them for everywhere from 5% to 20% of the score. I wasn't really satisfied with the results no matter how I did it. I'm convinced it's a skill because at least on average, our better players had more KOs, by quite a bit, than our lesser players. But we had one guy who rarely KOd anyone who was a consistent high finisher. We actually had an award (Top Bounty Hunter) for it. I wish I'd tracked only for that purpose and not the overall scoring, but what I found interesting is that usually the Top Bounty Hunter was in the top 2-4 players and competing for other awards anyway. I also found ever year one or two players seemed to run up high KO scores, but while above average in other years, the winner was different every year. I'm not sure what to make of that. It seems that there is also a significant luck element to it, but our season is pretty short, 12-14 games for the entire year. We have 2 designated bounty nights a year. The results on those nights seems to track how players did all year. No one got a lot on bounty nights unless they generally did all year long. I have some who perceive they do better on bounty nights. I can't prove that by the records we keep.

What I'd say is if you find something you really think works, I would love to see what you came up with. If you are thinking of making it part of a system, you might start tracking it. I had dealers at each table record bounties on paper. It was just one more duty for them, and while they did it, they would rather not have had to. Bounty chips are not that practical if split bounties are possible, so it's hard to go by bounty chips is 2, 3, or possibly even 4 players split one bounty. Splits are relatively rare, but they do happen.
 
@TexRex I totally get you on rebuys and I've always limited them to 1 as well, because for me they should really just be a lifeline in case of a bad beat early on, plus when playing with friends it ensures you don't have one guy sitting out for hours on his own. You're spot on though when you say that tournaments shouldn't be about deep pockets, this ain't a cash game.

That said I did allow the unlimited rebuy tournament to try out as a potential once a year thing. It did go down well so while 1 rebuy limit will be the norm I will probably have one tournament a year that allows unlimited.

Edit: I use Poker Timer to track buy-ins, rebuys and eliminations in real time so by the end of a tourney I know who has eliminated who, how many buy ins there has been and who has eliminated the most players, etc.
 
Back to your system, I know you say you don't like to penalise rebuys but, let's say a guy rebuys 10 times and wins and the other 9 guys don't rebuy at all. Does he get 20 points and 2nd place gets 14? I'm not sure how I feel about that... but maybe that's a problem with that rebuy structure and not the points system?
We also limit tournaments to just 1 rebuy per player (except the last game of the year which is a freezeout). We call it "The Robbie Rule" because one player (Robbie) had the tendency to play much deeper than everyone else, and it was hurting the game. So while our system is loaded to not discourage rebuys, the limit of 1 rebuy works for our point system.

Since you have just 1 game per year with unlimited rebuys, I can see that as actually encouraging rebuys, as that one game is going to be worth a whole lot of points.

If I recall, your unlimited rebuy tournament had no end time to the rebuy cut-off. You could freeze the points at whatever level your rebuy period usually ends, thus preventing the one game from being worth too many points.
 
Correct @Poker Zombie no limits on either rebuys or time.

I've had a look and there were a total of 23 buy-ins. For the same number of players (7) in any other game in my calendar you'd probably looking at 10 buy-ins, so that one game is worth approx double points. If I've got that right maybe an easy fix is to just divide the points by 2 for that one game?
 
You could do that, or the aforementioned points lock at level X (X=the level that rebuys typically end). I suspect it still may be worth more points, as players tend to shove more when rebuys dont stop, but I think it should be worth a little more than a regular event, as play-styles are different and more chips need to be accumulated to win.
 
Joe, I certainly get the sentiment regarding re-buys, but they aren't all the same. Where a player is limited to 1 re-buy, unless he gets KO'd early, he's typically buying in for way for way fewer BB than when he started, and he's typically buying a stack that is smaller than the average stack. Using the example of 10 players with 1 re-buy, I don't honestly think the one re-buy coming back to win indicates a problem. But I agree if he re-bought 10 times, that's a problem. In your hypo, he's put in 10/19 of the money. If that's actually profitable for him, I think the problem is the payout structure first, and the re-buy structure second. And both are problems, IMHO.

I've found most players want re-buys limited to 1, or sometimes 2. Players are in different economic situations. The deepest pocket buying winnings by re-buys others can't afford can kill a game. I've seen that happen. We had secondary tournaments for a while. It was a cheap $5 buy-in and re-buy. I had 2 players repeatedly re-buy. One of them, on his last re-buy, was re-buying in hopes of losing less money. I implemented a single re-buy rule for the secondary tournament, but no one has played since that night.

Most of ours are freeze-outs. In some, we do allow one re-buy, but the time is limited to the point where we think it is no more than halfway through. We have a large starting stack (400 BB), but our blinds increase by 50-67% every time, averaging about 58%. There are plenty of good structures out there. One thing I like about ours is that it naturally discourages re-buys. A guy who re-buys in R3 is getting way fewer starting chips.

As I said above, our formula reduces by 1.5% the final score for every extra $5. I've toyed with 2%, 3%, and 4%. I think anything over that penalizes too much. It makes some difference on a single re-buy, but not that much. I don't think a 1:1 ratio is truly reflects the skill required to win. My personal re-buy rule is if I feel like I'm playing well, but basically got unlucky, I'll re-buy if either the BB allow me to be competitive, or one case where they were paying 3, I got KO'd when I was effectively re-buying 2nd place money with 4 left because I was about 2 deal and 2 guys in front of me would both be paying blinds taking their stack well below mine. I just took advantage of what I thought were stupid re-buy rules. On the other hand, if I played poorly, I don't re-buy and just concede I had a bad night, so don't make it worse.

I tracked KOs for several years. I used them for everywhere from 5% to 20% of the score. I wasn't really satisfied with the results no matter how I did it. I'm convinced it's a skill because at least on average, our better players had more KOs, by quite a bit, than our lesser players. But we had one guy who rarely KOd anyone who was a consistent high finisher. We actually had an award (Top Bounty Hunter) for it. I wish I'd tracked only for that purpose and not the overall scoring, but what I found interesting is that usually the Top Bounty Hunter was in the top 2-4 players and competing for other awards anyway. I also found ever year one or two players seemed to run up high KO scores, but while above average in other years, the winner was different every year. I'm not sure what to make of that. It seems that there is also a significant luck element to it, but our season is pretty short, 12-14 games for the entire year. We have 2 designated bounty nights a year. The results on those nights seems to track how players did all year. No one got a lot on bounty nights unless they generally did all year long. I have some who perceive they do better on bounty nights. I can't prove that by the records we keep.

What I'd say is if you find something you really think works, I would love to see what you came up with. If you are thinking of making it part of a system, you might start tracking it. I had dealers at each table record bounties on paper. It was just one more duty for them, and while they did it, they would rather not have had to. Bounty chips are not that practical if split bounties are possible, so it's hard to go by bounty chips is 2, 3, or possibly even 4 players split one bounty. Splits are relatively rare, but they do happen.
Great post!

I do like the idea if a "Bounty Hunter" award at the end of the year for the most tournament knockouts, even if I'm not going to reward knockouts in the league points system.

For anyone that's wondering, I will be allowing rebuys until the completion of the 8th level, which will end up being 2 to 2.5 hours into the tournament depending on the time structure for each type of tourney. While I'll allow rebuys, the cutoff makes it difficult to rebuy more than once or twice unless someone decides to shove every hand all in, which among my group simply does not happen.
 
We started a league format this year that had similar goals as yours (with the exception that we don't allow rebuys).

The Structure we are using gives 1 point for attendance and then a sliding scale of points / prize money based on number of players:

<10 Players - Points = 6/4/3/2 | Cash = 50% /30%/20%
11-20 Players - Points 8/6/5/4/3/2 | Cash = 40%/30%20%10%
21-30 Players - Points 10/8/7/6/5/4/3/2 | Cash 40%/23%/16%/12%/9%
31-40 Players - Points 12/10/9/8/7/6/5/4/3/2 | Cash 33%/20%/15%/11%/8%/7%/6%

The points are accumulated throughout the year with top 9 playing in the 'Tournament of Champions' for the league prize pool. We use the points to then determine the number of chips each player will start with (average points = 400BB)

As for bounties; they don't get you any chips but they do have cash value (~25% of your buyin) and we are planning on giving an award to the highest 'bounty hunter' at the end of the season. Issue with awarding points for bounties is that it creates a "Win more" situation for the 1st (and maybe 2nd/3rd) place; as typically they have a majority of the bounties (for games of 20 or less players).

We intentionally chose not to allow rebuys as that put everyone on even footing (wide disparity of disposable income within our group); and it helps fill up the optional cash game we run for those knocked out of the tournament. We have only had someone go out really early a couple of times; usually there is a group of folks knocked out right after the first break which forms the core for the cash game.
 
I'm ambitiously looking to hold 12 tournaments next year in 2021. All dependent on a lot of things. COVID, player availability, etc. Realistically, we'll probably get in between 8 to 10 games,

I didn't see anybody else comment on this, but I only scanned the posts and didn't read them all. So, if already said, I apologize.

Whatever you do, define the number of tournaments that will make up the season and stick to it, no matter what! It's far better to postpone tournaments to a later date and extend the league finish date than to arbitrarily end the season after fewer tournaments or cancel some tournaments near the end of the period. The last thing you want is to be accused of protecting somebody's lead (or worse yet, your own) or denying somebody an opportunity to improve when you cancel tournaments. If you have a defined number of tournaments and stick to it, that eliminates the problem.

I would go conservative right now and limit the league to the 8-10 tournaments you mention.
 
Agreed. Make a schedule, and stick to it. I make my schedule, and then plan my vacations around it. We have postponed only 3 games in 11 years, two of them due to COVID.

And our league points winner just gets an embroidered shirt (and they have to buy the shirt). If there was any money on it, it could raise some eyebrows if you change games, dates, or schedule one when a points contender is out of town. If everyone has a schedule at the beginning of the year, it's on them if they go on vacation.
 
Alright folks, this is what I came up with, let me know what you think!


Yearly Poker Tournament League Rules/Point System- Jack's Card Room

Attendance to the game: One point

Third place: 60% of the total points possible rounded to the nearest number

Second place: 70% of total points possible rounded up to the nearest number

First place: 100% of total points possible rounded up to the nearest number

1. Points System: All regular league games (7 annually) will be T10,000 base NLHE tournaments unless otherwise noted. Unlimited re-buys will be allowed until the completion of level 8. Points will be awarded based on total buys. Initial buy-ins and re-buys count towards the total amount of buys and therefore points awarded for a given game.

Example One: Six player tournament with three re-buys = 9 total buy-ins. First place gets 9 points plus attendance point= 10 total points, Second gets 9 x 0.7= 6.3= 6 points awarded plus attendance point= 7 total points. Third place gets 9 x 0.6 = 5.4 = 5 points awarded plus one attendance point= 6 total points. All else get one point for attending

Example Two: Seven player tournament with five re-buys = 12 total buy-ins. First place gets 12 points plus attendance point = 13 total points. Second place gets 12 x 0.7 = 8.4 = 8 points plus one attendance point = 9 total points. Third gets 12 x 0.6 = 7.2 = 7 points plus one attendance point = 8 points.

2. In the event of a two way chop, the top two players will be awarded 80% of the total points possible. Third place will be awarded 60% of the points possible per usual.

In the event of a three way chop, each player will be awarded 70% of the total points possible.

3. Major Tournaments: There shall be three major tournaments on an annual basis, one taking place on or around Memorial Day Weekend, another on or around Labor Day Weekend, and the final as the last game of the annual season right before the holiday season in December. These are to be deep stack tournaments with no re-buys.

The points system for majors is the same as a league game, but with a 25% increase in value of points awarded.

Per example #2 above, as first, second, and third place are awarded 12, 8, and 7 points, respectively, these totals are to be multiplied by 0.25, which would equal 3, 2, and 2 additional points awarded respectively for each place. Therefore, first place would be awarded 15, 10, and 9 points, respectively in a major tournament with 12 total buy-ins (plus the one point attendance bonus).


4. End of year standings: This system does not penalize re-buys or not showing up to games, but it does reward those that do! Prizes will be awarded to the top 3 place finishers at the end of the year prior to the following January game once point tallies are added up and are confirmed. Prizes are to be determined!

5. All gameplay rulings when contested will be overseen by the tournament director/host for the night. All rulings that do not have abundantly clear solutions will be deferred to and ruled based on the latest available version of Robert’s Rules of Poker.
 
Alright folks, this is what I came up with, let me know what you think!


Yearly Poker Tournament League Rules/Point System- Jack's Card Room

Attendance to the game: One point

Third place: 60% of the total points possible rounded to the nearest number

Second place: 70% of total points possible rounded up to the nearest number

First place: 100% of total points possible rounded up to the nearest number

1. Points System: All regular league games (7 annually) will be T10,000 base NLHE tournaments unless otherwise noted. Unlimited re-buys will be allowed until the completion of level 8. Points will be awarded based on total buys. Initial buy-ins and re-buys count towards the total amount of buys and therefore points awarded for a given game.

Example One: Six player tournament with three re-buys = 9 total buy-ins. First place gets 9 points plus attendance point= 10 total points, Second gets 9 x 0.7= 6.3= 6 points awarded plus attendance point= 7 total points. Third place gets 9 x 0.6 = 5.4 = 5 points awarded plus one attendance point= 6 total points. All else get one point for attending

Example Two: Seven player tournament with five re-buys = 12 total buy-ins. First place gets 12 points plus attendance point = 13 total points. Second place gets 12 x 0.7 = 8.4 = 8 points plus one attendance point = 9 total points. Third gets 12 x 0.6 = 7.2 = 7 points plus one attendance point = 8 points.

2. In the event of a two way chop, the top two players will be awarded 80% of the total points possible. Third place will be awarded 60% of the points possible per usual.

In the event of a three way chop, each player will be awarded 70% of the total points possible.

3. Major Tournaments: There shall be three major tournaments on an annual basis, one taking place on or around Memorial Day Weekend, another on or around Labor Day Weekend, and the final as the last game of the annual season right before the holiday season in December. These are to be deep stack tournaments with no re-buys.

The points system for majors is the same as a league game, but with a 25% increase in value of points awarded.

Per example #2 above, as first, second, and third place are awarded 12, 8, and 7 points, respectively, these totals are to be multiplied by 0.25, which would equal 3, 2, and 2 additional points awarded respectively for each place. Therefore, first place would be awarded 15, 10, and 9 points, respectively in a major tournament with 12 total buy-ins (plus the one point attendance bonus).


4. End of year standings: This system does not penalize re-buys or not showing up to games, but it does reward those that do! Prizes will be awarded to the top 3 place finishers at the end of the year prior to the following January game once point tallies are added up and are confirmed. Prizes are to be determined!

5. All gameplay rulings when contested will be overseen by the tournament director/host for the night. All rulings that do not have abundantly clear solutions will be deferred to and ruled based on the latest available version of Robert’s Rules of Poker.
Personally, I think a 10-7-6 split on points is way too skewed towards 3rd place, and really short-changes 1st and 2nd, (and 4th). I'm a big fan of the 10-6-3-1 base system, as each successively higher finish is awarded more extra points than the previous one. Multiplying those values by field/entry size keeps smaller events equalized with larger events, and adding a 25% bonus for 'special' events is also easy.

Regarding point chops: I'm typically against chopping points at all, but am a staunch proponent that any point chops should never influence the point standings. Best way to do that is to dictate a policy that in a two-way chop for 1st/2nd place, both players receive 2nd place points, and in a three-way chop, all three players receive 3rd place points. Awarding points for a position that was not earned by actual play is unfair to other players in the point standings. If players want those extra points, they must play for them. I have no issues with players chopping the money, but earning points either requires playing to get them or you get the amount of points you've earned so far and nothing additional. Otherwise, it's too easy to collude or otherwise manipulate the points system, making it unfair to those players not involved in the chop.
 
Regarding point chops: I'm typically against chopping points at all, but am a staunch proponent that any point chops should never influence the point standings. Best way to do that is to dictate a policy that in a two-way chop for 1st/2nd place, both players receive 2nd place points, and in a three-way chop, all three players receive 3rd place points. Awarding points for a position that was not earned by actual play is unfair to other players in the point standings.
Strong points made there.

We have had very few chops ever, and both of them were instigated by a player that was unconcerned about points or Player of the Year standings, so I've put little to no thought into chops and awarded points based on chip totals - leading stack took 1st, 2nd took 2nd, but I was never thrilled with the idea.

Going forward, I may look into adding the "both players finish 2nd concept". It is a Player of the year battle, afterall. Points are awarded for attending. May as well deduct points for not completing. :tup:
 
Personally, I think a 10-7-6 split on points is way too skewed towards 3rd place, and really short-changes 1st and 2nd, (and 4th). I'm a big fan of the 10-6-3-1 base system, as each successively higher finish is awarded more extra points than the previous one. Multiplying those values by field/entry size keeps smaller events equalized with larger events, and adding a 25% bonus for 'special' events is also easy.

Regarding point chops: I'm typically against chopping points at all, but am a staunch proponent that any point chops should never influence the point standings. Best way to do that is to dictate a policy that in a two-way chop for 1st/2nd place, both players receive 2nd place points, and in a three-way chop, all three players receive 3rd place points. Awarding points for a position that was not earned by actual play is unfair to other players in the point standings. If players want those extra points, they must play for them. I have no issues with players chopping the money, but earning points either requires playing to get them or you get the amount of points you've earned so far and nothing additional. Otherwise, it's too easy to collude or otherwise manipulate the points system, making it unfair to those players not involved in the chop.
Much thanks for the feedback!

I hear where your coming from on the points split. That being said, I think I'm going to award points based on percentages to reward those that come out on top in a larger game. Finishing in the money or "in the points" in the top 3 or 4 is a lot easier in a 6 person STT rather than a 10 -12 multi table event. I want to reward those that outlast the field in a larger event somewhat, if that makes sense.

That being said, I usually get 5 on the low end to 8 at the absolute most for my games, so these are going to be mostly STT's. Those that place in an 8 player game should be rewarded as such as it's tougher to do so five handed. Want the points? Show up!

I think I agree with you on the chopping. In the past year and and half since I restarted my game, I've had about 8 tournaments, and there was only a chop once, but I need to account for the possibility. The disparity between 1st and 2nd, and 2nd and 3rd and so on I think will discourage chops, but things happen, and depending on the situation, adds a strategic element to the league element.
 
Much thanks for the feedback!

I hear where your coming from on the points split. That being said, I think I'm going to award points based on percentages to reward those that come out on top in a larger game. Finishing in the money or "in the points" in the top 3 or 4 is a lot easier in a 6 person STT rather than a 10 -12 multi table event. I want to reward those that outlast the field in a larger event somewhat, if that makes sense.

That being said, I usually get 5 on the low end to 8 at the absolute most for my games, so these are going to be mostly STT's. Those that place in an 8 player game should be rewarded as such as it's tougher to do so five handed. Want the points? Show up!

I think I agree with you on the chopping. In the past year and and half since I restarted my game, I've had about 8 tournaments, and there was only a chop once, but I need to account for the possibility. The disparity between 1st and 2nd, and 2nd and 3rd and so on I think will discourage chops, but things happen, and depending on the situation, adds a strategic element to the league element.
I typically award cash prizes to the top 25% of the field size, and award points to the top 33% of the field size. The 10-6-3-1 payout structure (for points or cash) refers to when there are 4 places awarded (covering cash payouts for fields up to 16 players). For only three awarded places, just the lower 6-3-1 portion is used, and for just two places, 3-1 is used. For field sizes that require that 5 places be awarded, 15-10-6-3-1 is used.
 

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