League Play, Games and Satellites

As a new player on this site, I find the League tournaments to be interesting. Some nice deep games with good participation and payout structures. If I could make just 3 small suggestions to the staff for comment, it would be these:

  1. Have a place where we can see all the games’ formats at once so we can pick the ones we would like to play. There are 7 formats for each of the 15K games and each League has a different format for each named game. For instance, American Prime, Asian Prime and European Prime are all on the same day but have different formats and blind structures. It would be nice to be able to see all the available games with their respective structures somewhere convenient. Maybe just add the details to the Promotions page where the names and times are already listed? Just a thought.

  2. If the League Leaderboards are meant for people who play both tournaments daily, wouldn’t it be best to space the tournaments out more than an hour apart? If someone runs deep in the 1st, they will still be in the thick of it when the 2nd one starts and wouldn’t be able to pay as close attention to either as maybe he or she would like. Spacing the 2 tournaments just a little farther apart may be beneficial to the top players who routinely have this issue come up. I assume the smaller tournaments average between 1.5 and 2 hours long so having 2 hours between the 2 daily tournaments would seem to be the most friendly for the players.

  3. Satellites - Love them in general. Freerolls are always fun and brutal and super-stingy with the payouts so I have no comments on these. They are what they are, a nice bonus. With the paid-for satellites though, I’ve noticed a little math “glitch” in how they are structured and played. At $2K per entry and a fixed 9 tickets as prizes, the math says no more than 67 people should enter the tournament or the EV goes negative (9 tickets x $15K each = $135,000 prize pool. 67 entries x $2K = $134,000 entry fees so this is max number before expected value goes negative). I would think this would cap the number of players who enter but it doesn’t seem to, especially in the 2:45 and 7:45 games.

Would it be possible to tweak the formula to match many live tournament satellites, where the number of tournament tickets awarded is a factor of the number of satellite participants? In this instance it would be 1 ticket added for every 7.5 entries to the satellite. I’m using the current buy-in of $2K here but is could easily be moved to $1.5K or 2.5K to make the math work out better if that is a concern (to 1 for 10 entries or 1 for 6 entries).

Again, I’m new here and still learning the ropes so maybe a lot of this has been discussed and rejected before. I apologize if I am asking something that you’ve already gone through. Unfortunately, when you have a staff as responsive and engaged as the one I’ve found here, you will get more questions and comments from people like me. I am so impressed with this site so far that its hard to believe I played somewhere else for so long before I found this place. Just a great product you have here. Thanks for providing it.

Thank you very much for your feedback 1Warlock. This is very much appreciated.

Please see my comments below.

  1. Have a place where we can see all the games’ formats at once so we can pick the ones we would like to play. There are 7 formats for each of the 15K games and each League has a different format for each named game. For instance, American Prime, Asian Prime and European Prime are all on the same day but have different formats and blind structures. It would be nice to be able to see all the available games with their respective structures somewhere convenient. Maybe just add the details to the Promotions page where the names and times are already listed? Just a thought.

We indeed offer many different tournament formats and structures at the moment. This is for everyone to be able to play their favourite format and also to make the general offering more diversified, interesting and fun. We usually show the key promotional tournament details on the promotion page and this is currently not the case for the leagues. We will make sure to add the tournament format details for the 3 leagues promptly. However, we will be working on improving the player experience on the poker room in 2017. We will most definitely take in account your feedback and see how we can improve the tournament format visibility.

  1. If the League Leaderboards are meant for people who play both tournaments daily, wouldn’t it be best to space the tournaments out more than an hour apart? If someone runs deep in the 1st, they will still be in the thick of it when the 2nd one starts and wouldn’t be able to pay as close attention to either as maybe he or she would like. Spacing the 2 tournaments just a little farther apart may be beneficial to the top players who routinely have this issue come up. I assume the smaller tournaments average between 1.5 and 2 hours long so having 2 hours between the 2 daily tournaments would seem to be the most friendly for the players.

These leagues were initially requested by players who could not compete on the monthly MTT leaderboards as they were only able to play during their time zone peak time, in the evening. We will need to balance the pros and cons here as some players like the possibility of playing these two tournaments at the same time, competing in a league without dedicating too many hours of play per day.

  1. Satellites - Love them in general. Freerolls are always fun and brutal and super-stingy with the payouts so I have no comments on these. They are what they are, a nice bonus. With the paid-for satellites though, I’ve noticed a little math “glitch” in how they are structured and played. At $2K per entry and a fixed 9 tickets as prizes, the math says no more than 67 people should enter the tournament or the EV goes negative (9 tickets x $15K each = $135,000 prize pool. 67 entries x $2K = $134,000 entry fees so this is max number before expected value goes negative). I would think this would cap the number of players who enter but it doesn’t seem to, especially in the 2:45 and 7:45 games.

Would it be possible to tweak the formula to match many live tournament satellites, where the number of tournament tickets awarded is a factor of the number of satellite participants? In this instance it would be 1 ticket added for every 7.5 entries to the satellite. I’m using the current buy-in of $2K here but is could easily be moved to $1.5K or 2.5K to make the math work out better if that is a concern (to 1 for 10 entries or 1 for 6 entries).

You are indeed 100% correct and we are very happy to hear that you are enjoying our freerolls and satellite tournaments :). We initially released the tournament ticket feature on Replay and we started creating satellites featuring fixed prize structures. This is indeed not ideal and we will definitely be looking at developping satellites with flexible prize structures, with prizepools being directly tied to the number of participants. We will also be looking at running more satellites, with different buy-ins and ticket prizes.

Again, I’m new here and still learning the ropes so maybe a lot of this has been discussed and rejected before. I apologize if I am asking something that you’ve already gone through. Unfortunately, when you have a staff as responsive and engaged as the one I’ve found here, you will get more questions and comments from people like me. I am so impressed with this site so far that its hard to believe I played somewhere else for so long before I found this place. Just a great product you have here. Thanks for providing it.

Thank you very much for your feedback 1Warlock and apologies for the delay on answering these. Please always come to us if you have any question or suggestion. Our top goal is to make sure you have the best experience possible on Replay. :slight_smile:

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“we will definitely be looking at developing satellites with flexible prize structures, with prize pools being directly tied to the number of participants.”

Just to follow up on this - I would bet dollars to doughnuts that you already have the templates for doing this already with the guaranteed prize pool chip tournaments you have. If you took that template and changed the payout structure to equal shares among all winners (to account for prizes being tickets rather than chips), you now have a variable quantity satellite, with a minimum prize pool ready to go.

Sorry if I’ve oversimplified things but I was thinking about how I would go about making this happen. It just came to me that it should be possible to tweak the existing GTD formula template rather than have to create a whole new one. If this is incorrect, I apologize. I am not a programmer at all and maybe that’s why I look for simple solutions.

Best regards and hope this helps in some way. Would be cool if it really could be done this easily.

Warlock , altho its kinda a pain to play 2 at once… the fact that all 3 leagues run so close is as Shaker said… so those ppl don’t have to carve out a huge time outlay each day to play…

But Shaker, obviously a happy medium was reached to put them 1 hr apart… I thought in another post I “enterjected” that for these perhaps having them like top 20 or 25, maybee to give ppl 2 days a week they didn’t have to play… there isn’t much “casual” about having to play every day to compete in a modified monthly league, and it is listed as a place casual players could compete.

Indeed it does not necessarily require massive development. This improvement is on the roadmap for 2017 and I am hopeful we will have it sooner rather than later. :slight_smile:

Thank you for following-up on this feedback Sassy_Sarah. If the two tournaments were featuring the same buy-in amount, we could include a rule whereby only the top X tournament performances would be taken in account towards the leaderboard. That way, players would not be required to play them all to be 100% competitive. But with the two tournaments having a different buy-in, it makes it a bit more complex as the tournament point calculation formula does take the buy-in amount in account.

I definitely hear your concern and take the feedback with me though. We will try to think on how we could make these leagues better for casual players and competitors. :slight_smile:

Thanks Sarah - the way it was explained does make sense. I was still finding my way around and having 2 windows open at the same time both made it hard to do both well and also caused my computer to freeze up. New laptop seems to have fixed the latter issue. As it turns out, I haven’t even had the chance to play at all yet in 2017 so at this point I’d be happy if I could just get into 1 MTT.

GL to you ad all who play enough to compete on the leaderboards. Even “only” 2 games a day is more than I can do so the leaderboard competition is something I wont be able to seriously look at even attempting. Oh well.

Shakeraise1 - Very good to hear. Now, about those doughnuts … :wink:

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Just my 2 cents worth, started playing the American League the last week of December, and had a lot of fun, but when it came to playing both games at the same time, things got a bit out of my control, it was not my computer that caused the problem, it was being 71 years old, and not wanting to delay table play, i caught myself folding on 1 table so I would not hold up play on the other one. Getting deep into the first one, just as the other one starts, and it will play much faster, creates a bit of a problem for us old timers. It would be nice to find some way to spread them out a bit.

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Correct Shakeraise…
I was more thinking 20 or 25 of each, I just meant if you play both each day… it would be nice to have 1-2 days off a week you didn’t have to play… I’m sure its only a couple lines of code to accomodate this.

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