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#425 – “You’re Uncle Tilty” Report – Part II
TOURNAMENT IDEAS
Several entries concerned tournament innovations. In fact, one of the winners, SchaefPerro, suggested a regularly-scheduled series of tournaments of unusual formats. I instinctively like these ideas, or at least I like considering them. Most of them aren’t realistic or would have very limited appeal. On the other hand, it’s possible out of everyone playing on Full Tilt, there might be eight people who want to play pot-limit Razz. The Bellagio can’t spare a table to try to hustle up a pot-limit Razz game, but they are constrained by limits that don’t apply to Full Tilt.
Duevy suggested a tournament called “The RanDomizeR” (his capitalization). The blinds would increase each level as normally, the the game would randomly change as well as whether the level was being played as “limit,” “pot-limit,” or “no-limit.” “For instance, the first level could be 10-20 Stud Hi/lo NL!!! Then the second level could be 15-30 Razz PL. There are a lot of combinations and could be a lot of fun. I introduce this for the people who become zombies during tournaments going through the motions thinking they have conquered poker.”
Duevy doesn’t explain why the “zombies” would be attracted to this game. Frankly, if I thought I had “conquered poker,” I’d innovate as little as possible.
Bayne had a more practical tournament idea, a weekly $200 + $16 Omaha EOB event, alternating between limit and pot-limit. (Here were Bayne’s three other suggestions, of varying merit and motivation: (1) not playing FTOPS events on Mother’s Day or Valentine’s Day. “Could you really do anything worse to increase static over poker playing habits than playing on these 2 holidays?” Good point. (2) “I would still allow the RNG to allow the flush draw jams to beat my sets the predicted 27% of the time on the flop and 15% after the turn but I would change the bricks to be one of 2 suited cards that pairs the boards.” (3) “Every Ace rag pre-flop jam into a pocket pair will flop an Ace, to make up for the odds 70% of the time the river will give the pocket pair a set.”) Francis wants to see more deep-stack HORSE tournaments and some Deuce-to-Seven Triple Draw.
Josh suggested a heads-up HORSE tournament where you had to move all-in or fold on the first bet. Another entrant – also named Josh, but a different person – suggested an all-in-or-fold tournament. “Every once in awhile,” Josh II says, “everyone gets that gambling drive to just play it by luck and see if they hit that flush on the river by calling half of their stack …. A tournament like this is for people who are just feeling ‘lucky’!”
A couple problems: first, in this environment, Full Tilt should probably devote its innovation resources to games based on skill rather than games where luck is advertised as the dominant fact. Second, there is actually a fair amount of skill in a jam-or-fold game, or at least some great skills developed as a result of playing it. Can you think of a more important skill than knowing whether to play your starting cards? Playing this kind of game – like the turbo tournaments where I have far outperformed the random distribution of results – puts such a premium on knowing how to play your starting cards that you develop this skill tremendously. But that’s a different matter than institutionalizing jam-or-fold tournaments. (Actually, those ridiculous Super Turbo SnG satelites before big Full Tilt tournaments incorporates this idea, and those things are unbelievably popular in the final minutes before big events.)
There are three problems with most ideas for tinkering with forms of tournament poker: (1) limited appeal; (2) virtually no appeal after the novelty has worn off; and (3) some of these modifications have theoretical problems that, once understood, make them easy to play or avoid.
