League championship tourney - Variable chip stacks

[Muley05]

I have decided to run a season ending tourney for my next poker league season, rather than just crown the overall points leader the champion.

We normally have about 20 players at a given league tourney.  Everyone starts with 5000 chips.  Each player is allowed one rebuy during the first three levels, and there are usually only 2-3 rebuys each tourney.

My idea for now is to have the top ten in points play for the league championship.  If a player in the top ten cannot make it, the next on the list will play for the championship so that we start with a full 10 person table.

I do want to weight the chip stacks to give those that finished higher some advantage.  I am also thinking about giving an additional bonus for each tournament win.  What I am struggling with is how to weigh the chip stacks.

Anyone have any suggestions?

[holdemholmes]

Are you thinking of weighing the chip stacks with a set amount in between each spot or go according to how far ahead first was over second, second over third, etc? My only concern is that if 1st has a gigantic lead over the 9th/10th place finishers the lower ranked players will have such a disadvantage that they wont have a chance.

[Muley05]

After I posted my initial thoughts, I found something that seems reasonable.  The pool of bonus chips is a percentage of the total chips in play, such as 25%.  So with 10 players with 5000 chip starting stacks, the pool of bonus chips would be 25% of 50,000, or 12,500 bonus chips. 

Then I would take the total number of points for the 10 players that make the final table, and divide each player's individual point total by the total number of points for all players, and take that number times the pool of bonus chips.

For example, if Player A has 150 points and the total number of points for the 10 players is 1800, player A would get 8.333% of the bonus chips, or 1041 chips (round that to 1050).

That isn't too big of a stretch, and on top of that I would give a bonus of 10% of the starting stack for each tournament win by a player.

[Martini]

I'm not a fan of the staggered starting stacks though I respect the decision for others to do so.

That said, I'm very curious how staggered starting stack sizes affect the outcome of a tourney. It would be hard to draw any meaningful conclusions from anything but a mountain of data especially since the players with the biggest starting stacks are the ones who have shown to have played best over a season already and would presumably already be favored in the tourney. I guess the most scientific way would be to have many tourneys with the same people and give everyone randomly staggered chips stacks.

As for the methodology, taking Muley05's figure of 25%, everyone would get an average of 1250 bonus chips. I stole some sample data off of the front page of Google's results for "poker league standings" and found a league with the top ten players having the following points: 1314, 1240, 1089, 1004, 976, 953, 938, 774, 754, 596 and total up to 9638 total points with percentage ranges from 6% to 14% of the bonus pool. Multiply that by the 12,500 bonus chips and you get bonus chip amounts from 773 to 1704 or starting stacks from 5773 to 6704 or top seed having 116% the stack of the tenth seed. That seems really reasonable to me if you're going to stagger stacks. There is a lead given but the shortest stack is in no way out of the running.

Then there is the psychological aspect of the stacks and how that may affect people's play. Will a short stack play more aggressive than normal in the early stages despite having a workable stack? Will the chip leader try to bully the table more than he would or rather try to nurse his lead?

Again, I don't care for the practice of staggering starting stacks but I think it's a really interesting topic to look at.

[Muley05]

Thanks for the input, Martini.  You always seem to come up with compelling information.

If I use my current standings, the chip stacks would range from 14,000 for the top guy to 9625 for the 10th guy.  This is using 8000 chip starting stacks, a pool of 20,000 bonus chips, and then an 800 chip bonus for each tourney win.  The guy in first this year has one three of the 9 tourneys we have had, so he is a substantial lead.

I think this is as large a difference as I would ever expect to see, and I would think that it would normally be much closer.  Still, if I am adding 40% of the league prize pool ($5 is held back from each buy in/rebuy throughout the season) and still have everyone buy in for the regular buy in of $30, we would be looking at a prize pool of $740 for a 10 man tourney.  That is a pretty good deal, where you are more than doubling the prize pool.  That makes the varying chip stacks more tolerable, IMO.

[Squiggly]

We've run staggered stacks at our final event for the last four seasons, with 10th place receiving about 55% of first place stack.

FWIW, three of the four events have seen the last place person win the event. I think the psychological factor plays a LOT into it, as Martini has stated.

[Martini]

We've run staggered stacks at our final event for the last four seasons, with 10th place receiving about 55% of first place stack.

FWIW, three of the four events have seen the last place person win the event. I think the psychological factor plays a LOT into it, as Martini has stated.

Clearly too small of a sample size of course but what *if* the net effect of short stacking someone was that it increased their odds of winning? Then staggered chip stacks would be having the opposite outcome from what was desired.

[Martini]

@Muley05
Wow. Sounds like first place is just crushing everyone this season. Kudos to them!

I also forgot to suggest that the season ending tourney format should be decided before the start of the tourney. At the very least so that there can be no perception of conflict of interest but mainly because all this stuff should be decided ahead of time.

If everyone still buys in to the final tourney, maybe an alternative to staggered chip stacks would be staggered buy ins. Players with the most points over the season could buy in at a discount but everyone would still have identical starting stacks. That way everyone is on a level playing field at the table but the players who did better stand to have an improved ROI. Then again, having the event be cheaper or even nearing a freeroll for the points leader might again introduce a psychological wrinkle where the top seed hurts his own chances by treating the tourney too lightly.

[Muley05]

@Muley05
Wow. Sounds like first place is just crushing everyone this season. Kudos to them!

I also forgot to suggest that the season ending tourney format should be decided before the start of the tourney. At the very least so that there can be no perception of conflict of interest but mainly because all this stuff should be decided ahead of time.

If everyone still buys in to the final tourney, maybe an alternative to staggered chip stacks would be staggered buy ins. Players with the most points over the season could buy in at a discount but everyone would still have identical starting stacks. That way everyone is on a level playing field at the table but the players who did better stand to have an improved ROI. Then again, having the event be cheaper or even nearing a freeroll for the points leader might again introduce a psychological wrinkle where the top seed hurts his own chances by treating the tourney too lightly.

The format will definitely be decided before the season starts.  I am implementing this for my next league season, which starts in April.  I just want to get the details ironed out ahead of time.

If I used my prior season, the starting stacks ranged from 12,250 to 9450.  That is closer to what I would expect.  Also, in that scenario the person who was second in points has more chips than the person who was first in points because of the tourney win bonus.  I like that.

Also, with having the prize pool for this final tourney sweetened (and more than doubling it), I really think that offsets the issue of buying into a tourney where people have different starting stacks.  I think most players would buy into a tourney for $30 with a stack that was 60% less than the big starting stack if the prize pool meant that you were in effect playing in a $60 or $70 buy in tourney because of the money added.