I am getting ready to start a poker league in a couple of months that will send two of our league members to a $1500 event at the 2011 WSOP. I know how the masses here feel about WSOP leagues, but this is not what I want to discuss here, although I will say that all of the fees for the WSOP seats will be collected up front.
The league will have 20 players, and the top point earner for the whole season will win one seat.
The other seat will be given away at a freeroll tourney at the end of the season. How to format that freeroll is giving me a bit of trouble.
My first idea was to make the freeroll a one table event with only people that won at least one regular tourney. But then I thought that I might want to open it up to some other players who performed well but never actually came in first place.
So here are the ideas I have now.
1) Only the winners are invited to the championship freeroll
2) Anyone who came in first or second is invited to the freeroll
3) Anyone who earned X points is invited
4) Anyone who earned X money is invited
My tourneys are T5000. I did also think that if non-winners were invited, that those who did win a regular tourney would have extra chips to start, maybe even up to 5000 extra per tourney won.
The whole goal is to send the two best representatives of our league to the WSOP, and I welcome any feedback. The whole point of having the freeroll at the end is to keep those that aren't performing well interested throughout the entire season.
I think option 3 is the best answer to the last thing you said.
Also, maybe have a play-in game for the last seat available? For example, if you have a 10-player championship based on total season points - give the top 9 autobids, and then have a tournament for everyone else, winner gets the final seat to the championship.
In our league, we take the top 10 in points for the season and anyone who has won a tournament and been to at least half (6) of the tournaments for the season for our year end free roll. In years past we had given the top point getter 10% of the prize pool and started everyone with the same amount of chips. This year however, we are trying allotting the # of chips one gets at the free roll based on the place they finish in the final standings.
This is a good thread.
Doing it like that - unbalanced starting stacks - seems to be uncommon, at least from what I can tell on this forum, but that's how we do it too. The whole format was in place for a few years before I even joined, so I don't really know how it evolved or the thought process that went into it.
We have a very odd scoring system, but it's fair and performance-based. And for our championship, the top 10 players get autobids. The championship formula is very odd too. 100,000 chips total are divided amongst the top 10, based on a weighted-average formula that counts total points for the season heavier than it does season point average. It shakes out such that the #1 seed usually starts out with 3 to 3.5 times that of the #10 seed. I really don't like that at all - I'd like to tweak the formula into getting a 2 to 2.5 to 1 spread - but it's unbiased and performance based, and it's what they've been running with since the league's inception. And it's a deep stack so even the 10 seed usually starts with around 50-60 BB.
Anyone else who has played the minimum of 6 league games is welcome to play, albeit at an extreme disadvantage - T1000 plus
T200 for every league game played over 6. That usually brings in another player or two, starting off at 10-16 BB. Only once has any of these stragglers ever made any waves, and that didn't last far beyond the first break.
This season we will also have a TOC for the weekly winners a couple weeks after the Championship, and we will begin doing a Tournament of Grand Champions (all the season championship winners, obviously) every other year, beginning this year or the next.
I thought I was leading up to a point or a question with all my ramblings, but I haven't had enough coffee yet, I forget.
