Tournament Cancellations

Why do Tournaments get cancelled? I was about to join Replay Challenge and it was cancelled. Why does this happen?

My guess would be insufficient enrollment?

1 Like

The minimum number of players on most 9 seat tournaments is 2. But for the European Culture 1:45 pm EST, tournament it is 9. It just suffered it’s (at least) 3rd cancellation, so I was wondering if you would consider making it a 2 minimum, as well.

Hi Watchout8,
The Replay Challenge requires a minimum of 4 players in order for it to take place. It is worth mentioning that these 4 players must be registered 3 minutes before the start time or the tournament will be cancelled. This applies to all MTT tournaments. Once the tournament has started there is a late entry, in the case of Replay Challenge this is 10 minutes, but other tournaments vary between 5 and 20 minutes.
Hope this helps.

2 Likes

Wow, I’m surprised it needs 9 to start. I thought all the regionals had a minimum of 2 to start. The change in start time (to the same time as the freeroll), has caused Oceanic Wave to get cancelled a couple times, and I’ve saved it at least twice at the last minute. It rarely starts with enough players to fill a table now.

I feel like that should be changed to up to start time. If replay would wait until then more people would probably have registered then it probably wouldn’t have been cancelled.

Hi, everyone

Yes, @JanCee that is the answer to why tournaments cancel. There is a minimum number of players.

Heres a little bit about how that works:.

If a Replay tournament has a Guaranteed prize pool, we usually require 4 players to be registered. This is so that we dont have tournaments which start with just 2 or 3 players then complete after 2 hands and the game ends. (We do not deal hands to a tournament with just one player, they are declared the winner)

  • If two players register and play heads up and there is no Guarantee, then one of them wins the entry from the other, less fee and its like a HU SnG.
  • If for example there is a 20k event with a Guarantee of 1 million chips and just two players join, Replay tends to view that as a bad deal for the site if we contribute 960,000 of the prize pool, even though I appreciate players would like it.
    4 gives the tournament a chance of running long enough for players to Late register.

The Regional games are Guaranteed but with the exception of European Culture they require two starters. This is because they are more popular than most other mtts and generally start. I have changed European Culture so that it requires two as well. Thank you for identifying that.

With regard to the Start time not being used as the cut off / cancellation point.
We check the enrollment two minutes before the game starts and cancel it if necessary at that time because of a logistical process. We want to make a decision at some point before the Start time if the game will go ahead or not. It takes a minute or two to create tables, seat players and allow them to open the table. If that process began at start time, the game would actually start 2 minutes later.

Seating players with ‘too few’ players and then cancelling it anyway at start time after the existing players are seated and ready is also not an option we want to offer.

MTTs are usually open for 24 hours before Start time, so to avoid disappointment, I always recommend registering in plenty of time. Besides helping the tournament reach its minimum roster, it also makes the game more appealing to other players who are browsing.

Thanks for asking !

Rob

6 Likes

Great explanation Rob :+1:t2:

2 Likes