Week In Review #34 November 10th - November 16th
What time should poker tournaments start?
The topic du jour on Poker Twitter is tournament start times. Do they start too early? Too late? Or at just the right time? The conversation was sparked when Seth Davies posted:
The industry is due for a paradigm shift in tourney start times. Starting a tourney at 12pm, 1pm, 2pm and playing really late is rough. Almost no one likes it, pros and recs alike. Let’s start tourneys at 10am. Finish at a reasonable time. If you bust early you can still have the evening free.
My current sleep schedule at home is something like getting ready for bed around 10:00 PM and waking up around 6:00 AM, so one would think I’d sign off on the “paradigm shift” of moving tournament start times earlier in the day, but there are a couple of confounding factors for me. I play almost no poker in the time zone where I reside, so whenever I play poker my sleep schedule is already a jet-lagged mess. If you asked me when the ideal time for a tournament to start would be at a stop where I am staying on property, I would say something like ~3 hours after my first sip of caffeine. In Europe that would often mean 2 PM; in Asia that would often mean 9 AM. If there is a 5-hour gap between my preferred start time depending on where I am in the world, then my preferences are not really about what is best for the game, but what is best for me.
I am going to violate my code and begin arguing my case with an anecdote, but if you look at breakfast buffets at EPTs at 9 AM, they are empty; if you look at them at 11 AM, they have lines out the door. I do not think the average EPT reg would like a 10 AM start time if they can’t even make a 10 AM breakfast, and these late-risers are all people who don’t need to commute to the poker room. A reasonable counter-argument to my anecdote is that 11 AM breakfast lines grow larger throughout a series as people have had days of playing late and have adjusted to an unnaturally late sleep schedule. I think this is a fair point, but it leads me to my primary point: The issue is not when tournaments start, it is when they finish.
There is a correlation between when the first hand is dealt and when the last hand is dealt, but each stop will have their own peculiarities. Tournaments in Vegas are unique: Most players are not staying on property; there is easy access to transportation and food at all hours. Tournaments in Vegas should not be scheduled like tournaments in the Bahamas, where there are limited late-night food options. At Triton, it is easy to order food to the poker table, and it’s all free (well, covered for by the high rake you pay). Triton tournaments have at most 300 players in the poker room, while stops like EPTs in Barcelona or the WSOP often have thousands of people in a poker room playing different tournaments on different schedules. At those stops, simple things like having everyone bag their chips and exit the casino can take a very long time. They need to have longer breaks and longer dinner breaks to accommodate for larger crowds. Since every stop is different, starting tournaments earlier will solve some problems, but not every one, so I think it is more important to focus on solutions that will improve the experience in all tournaments.
I think there is a simpler way to have days end earlier for more poker players: End late registration earlier. I am about to say something so obvious I feel the need to add this preamble lest you think I am insulting your intelligence: If late registration closes at 5 PM instead of 8 PM, you will play around three hours less per day.1 In November 2020, POTD subscriber Isaac Haxton wrote about the gamesmanship problems with leaving late registration open too long and posted it on the Party Poker Blog. He makes a strong argument, but he did not mention the logistical and scheduling problems that are caused by letting leaving late registration open too long. Allowing long periods of late registration makes field sizes bigger, which makes tournaments and especially hand-for-hand bubbles last longer. In some cases where max-late-registration is extremely profitable, so many people will enter the tournament at the last second that it needs to be paused for upwards of half an hour to seat everyone. These factors cause days to run longer.
Operators want late registration open as late as possible so more people can rebuy and they can collect more rake, but sometimes that leads to situations where schedules punish game starters and reward, to use Steve O’Dwyer’s word to describe Daniel Smilijkovic, parasites. It used to be that EPT single days would start at 12:30, play 6 hours with two twenty-minute breaks, go on dinner break from 7:10 to 8:10, and close registration. The logic was that the EPT wanted to give players an extra hour to enter a high roller if they busted the main event or another side event. I talked to the floors at the EPTs and said I thought that was unfair because they are ensuring that people who start games and rebuy will only have a one-hour dinner break and will play later days, so that max-late-reg players can get an extra hour to prepare themselves to play a 15bb stack. If you want days that end earlier, starting them earlier is admittedly the easiest way to do it, but it does punish night owls, people who are jet-lagged, or people with day jobs. Closing late registration earlier accomplishes the same thing while also decreasing the effects of predatory gamesmanship. Of course, this is not a binary choice; you can do both. But since operators like rake, I think earlier start times are more likely to be implemented than reduced late registration, but if you are looking for a paradigm shift in tournament scheduling, start with late reg policy.
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Additional Sims For Premium Subscribers
Premium subscribers get the raw files of sims I used to write my POTDs, sims that are more accurate and appropriate than equivalent sims in the big public libraries, videos of me walking through the sims, and a text summary of how I ran the sims. This week I uploaded:
Two PIO sims looking at different cbet strategies from Kayhan for POTD #166
A PIO sim looking at the exact betting line we went down in POTD #167
PIO sims looking at different BB leading strategies from Adrian for POTD #168
PIO sims looking at different preflop strategies for Jeremy for POTD #169
A PF HRC sim and PIO ICM sim for POTD #170
Additional Analysis for Premium Subscribers
Everyday Premium Subscribers get an extra bit of analysis not included on Substack. Today I’ll share #onemorething from POTD #170, where I shared some advice I gave to POTD subscriber Jen Shahade before her Final Table and eventual third place finish at the NAPT Main Event:
POTD #170 onemorething
POTD subscriber Jen Shahade FTed the NAPT Main Event this week and asked me about for some reads on her opponents and some general strategy tips, before the FT. I was in the middle of writing POTD #170 and thinking forlornly about a FT where I did not play to the best of my abilities, so I decided to do something I rarely do when I am asked for advice before a big FT. Give the person general mindset advice about playing a big FT. So I am repurposing that advice and sharing some of it with POTD premium subscribers.
“One final thing that I will mention is that sometimes big FTs can be psychologically frustrating. When payjumps are for so much money, it can feel like you’re devoting all your psychic energy to hoping someone else gets coolered. Then two short stacks double and it feels like no one will ever bust the tournament.
It’s always good to remind yourself, you are still in a great spot, if there are 8 people left and you are 8/8, you are still a favourite to ladder. It might take longer than you’d hope it would and it might require winning an all-in or two, but 8/8 doesn’t always finish 8/8. If you go from 2/6, to 4/6, don’t fret there is a lot of poker to play. and definitely on’t get hungup on someone stealing the blinds twice and “passing you”. You’ve seen final tables play out before. It’s rare for a tournament or FT to go smoothly. Just focus on making good decisions and play within your overall game plan we discussed earlier. Finally, I’ll get corny for a bit. Have fun! There is truly nothing more fun than having a deep run in a big field main event, it happens so rarely and it’s always a treat. GL”
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Bluesky
Okay, for the pedants like me: If late registration closes earlier, your max-late reg bullet will last you longer than if you register with 10bbs, so it probably saves you two hours, not three. Nevertheless.