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#409 – You’re Uncle Tilty – Winning Entry of SchaefPerro
This is the winning entry of SchaefPerro, in which he proposes a year-long series of tournaments he called the Offbeat Poker Series. What I like most about his idea – in addition to the fact he obviously put a lot of thought into this – is that it treats a regular tournament as a laboratory for trying out new tournament variations. It may be impossible – virtually or actually – to write software for this many poker variations but the idea of experimenting with poker rules is fun to consider.
[Note: This entry is way too long but I chose not to disqualify it because (a) of its obvious merit, and (b) because the crux of the idea could have been stated - and was stated - in 150 to 200 words.]
CONTEST ENTRY FOR SchaefPerro:
My idea for innovation is inspired by two recent happenings at Full Tilt. First, the fairly recent nightly addition to the tournament schedule…the $69+6 limit tournament that is a different limit event each night. Secondly, in celebration of Eric Seidel’s recent WPT win, they held a $54,321 guarantee tournament where each player started with a stack of 4,321 chips. The caption to the tournament was “Why not?”
These got me to thinking about what else Full Tilt could do add a little spice and variety to the tournament schedule. Don’t get me wrong, I think whoever the tournament director(s) are for multi table tourneys, they do a great job of creating a flowing tournament schedule with a lot of different options at all times of the day. But I thought, hey, there are a lot of other potentially fun tournaments that FTP hasn’t tried out yet, and as they said before, “Why not?”
So here is what I propose — a year long tournament series celebrating all things “off the beaten path” — The Offbeat Poker Series.
While the details could be tweaked by Uncle Tilty and his colleagues, here are the parameters I have dreamed up.
1. The series would consist of 100 tournaments, starting in mid-July and running every Saturday for 50 weeks.
2. Each Saturday, there would be a $10+2 tournament at 14:00 ET and a $10+2 tournament in the same event at 19:30 ET. This would let some curious players take two cracks at the same event, and would also accommodate American and European players alike. Each event would have a guaranteed prize pool of $5,000.
3. The events could be a wide range of non-traditional tournaments, but some that I have thought of include the following: (It should be noted that any turbo events would be dubbed “Michael Craig’s Candyland).
- NL Holdem 4-max: Tables restricted to a maximum of 4 players.
- “10:1 Super Stack Super Turbo”: 10,000 starting chips, 1 minute levels.
- HHHHHR!: 5 levels of NL Holdem and 1 level of Razz per hour.
- “Penny Rebuy” Tourney: Rebuys for the first hour cost only a penny.
- Limit Hi tourney: Levels alternate between Limit Holdem, Limit Stud Hi, and Limit Omaha Hi.
- Variety Holdem: 20 minute levels alternate between NL, PL, and Limit holdem.
- 100% Bounty Tourney: 100% of Player’s entry goes as a knockout bounty.
- “Every Symbol” Tournament: Superstack, turbo, 6-handed, rebuy/add-on, knockout.
- Modified Shootout NL Holdem where each table plays down to 3 remaining before next round.
- PL Variety Event: Levels alternate between PL Holdem, Omaha, and Omaha Hi/Lo
- NL HORSE rebuy
- Inflation NL Holdem Tourney: Players start with 100,000 chips, blinds start at 500/1000.
- Heads up tournament where the game type for each round is randomly selected. (Could be PL Omaha 8 in first round, NL holdem in round 2, razz in round 3, etc.)
- Super Turbo MTT: A variation on the super turbo satellites that Full Tilt runs before major events. 500 starting chips, blinds increase every 3 minutes.
Clearly the possibilities here are pretty limitless, and would give Tilters a chance to play in some events that can be found nowhere else. The more popular tournament types could be repeated several weeks throughout the course of the series.
4. The winner of each of the 100 tournaments would gain entry into a freeroll for a WSOP Main Event package.
5. There would be an Offbeat Poker Series overall leader board. Players would accumulate points and compete to be the best overall offbeat player. At the end of the series, the top players on the leader board would be given WSOP-related prize packages. This would be funded out of the extra $1 of every entry fee (since the tourneys have $10+2 buy-ins).
Hypothetically, if 500 players entered each of the 100 events (just enough to meet the guaranteed prize pool), that would generate an extra $50,000 for the leader board payouts. It could look something like this:
1st Place: spend. ($15k)
2nd Place: $12,000 Main Event Package
3rd Place: $10,000 Main Event Entry
4th-5th Places: Bracelet Event Entry + $1500 cash ($3k)
6th-10th Places: Bracelet Event Entry ($1500)
So that’s my idea for a cool innovation at Full Tilt. Yes, it’s lengthy. Yes, it’s crazy. But hey, why not?
