New MTT Schedule - Feedback and Discussion

[DonkeyHunter]

Hi! 🙂

This is a long one. I’m just going to list everything by numbering. Please feel free to let me know if you agree or disagree. Use the numbering to avoid any confusion.

1. I miss the old tournaments with different bounty ratios (Correct me if ratios are wrong here). This was as far as I know unique to Unibet, at least the number of different of ratios.

• Ice Giant                              50% bounty, 25% progressive
• Shooting Star                      50% bounty, 25% progressive
• Space madness bounty    90% bounty, 10% progressive
• Dwarf Star bounty              25% bounty, 25% progressive
• Supermoon                         50% bounty, 50% progressive

Why?

First, simply just because it keeps thing more interesting when every bounty tournament is not the same.
Second, regular players study the 50/50 PKO format because its the most common PKO format and recreational players don’t.
Third, in 50/50 PKO’s a too large fraction of the prize pool goes to 1st place compared to 2nd -9th.
Fourth, in PKO’s sort of the survival aspect of MTT’s is lost. A lower progressive value means more fold equity in later stages of the tournament. It would be nice to reintroduce fold equity to PKO tournaments (yes, this is a joke …. sort of). At the same time bounties are bigger early and makes thing more interesting early when stacks are deep.

 

2. The thing I really like about Unibet is the smaller fields which in the end means lower variance and they are less time consuming. You can finish a reg-speed tournament in 4 and not 10 hours. Overall, the feel of the new schedule is that there are less tournaments overall, but guarantees are larger.

3. This might be an unpopular opinion, however there is too much turbo in the new schedule. The old 8-min level tournaments were like the perfect semi turbo compromise between players that like normal speed tournaments and turbo players. There are 2 non-turbos between 20:05 and 00:30. I understand and agree with the goal to finish tournaments before 1AM. With the smaller fields of non-major tournaments, I don’t see how this is not possible. I just realized Fofty was changed from Turbo to 7min levels, a change in the right direction in my opinion. So that makes it 3 tournaments.

 

4. I think everything, at least most tournaments with level-up speed <= 6 min should be changed to 6-Max. There is a reason most hypers are 6-Max.

 

5. What happened to 9-Max PKO’s? There is not a good balance between 6-max and 9-max PKO’s in my opinion. I’ve seen others mention this on here as well ever since all the old “Falling Star” was replaced with “Shooting Star”. I suggest changing the Battleground to 9-Max. The Battleground, Title Fight and Slobberknocker is essentially the same tournament with different buy in level.

 

6. In lobbies of R/A tournaments the Add on field is empty. It would be useful to know how many chips add-on is compared to starting stack. If the purpose of that field is for something else, please add this information to the description text. Does this count as a bug?

 

7. More filler “vanilla” or PKO non-turbo tournaments. If they are lower buy in (please not nano), hopefully they dont steal attention from majors.

 

8. Let’s talk about Fofty. It is 1 of the 2 highest buy-in daily tournaments. Edges are lower because it’s a turbo and the field is slightly tougher, which is why I think a slower structure makes more sense. This tournament was the only major tournament to never meet the guarantee I think. Maybe the guarantee was simply too ambitious? My guess is that most spend their 50 euro in The Title Fight and all the turbo lovers play Bullet instead. But then again, not every tournament can be a favorite. I do like all of the non turbo majors so far and will probably play most of them whenever I start a session.

 

Edited October 28, 2022 by DonkeyHunter
Type error

[Andy-Relax]

20 hours ago, Purps said:

Well you only have 4 possible variations with game format and table size, which isn't much, so completely disregarding one of those doesn't seem that great imo. And yeah, most of the deck is dealt out, but that just requires a slightly different skill-set. You could even call it a bit more "rec-friendly". The game can still be fun. However obviously, the higher the buy-in, the less interest there would be for full ring PLO, but I can see it doing ok on the lower stakes.

I'm obv a little biased with this, as I would most prefer to play full ring plo8 which we don't have now and probably never will, so this would be closest to it and something I would always choose if I had to play one tournament a day. There used to be a full ring PLO PKO ( shooting/falling star ) still not that long ago and I don't recall it getting considerably less love than the 6-maxes did.

But that's just my 2 cents... If that's not a good format in yours and everyone elses mind, so be it.

Firstly, I don't think the "you have the option, so you should do it" argument is a very good one. There are lots of silly options in the back office that could be used to make a tournament that go unused and I doubt the big sites are spreading all the game types they have available at every table size just because it's an option.

I don't really see how it would be rec-friendly either when it's essentially just a game of who gets dealt the nuts wins. Rec players will just lose more often because they're likely to not play the best starting hands and not play as well post flop. I'd imagine there is little to no room for bluffing either. 

One of the main goals of the new schedule was to build something that had more of what population (global poker player population, not Unibet) plays, so that we can try to attract new players to the site and grow. I did lots of research into what was popular on other sites and what wasn't and the results are the foundation of the new schedule. It's why R/As were reduced (because they're almost non-existent outside iPoker) and why PLO is only 6-max. If there was a demand for 9-max PLO MTTs then Stars, GG and the other guys, with their much bigger player pools and data samples, would be running them... and they don't (at least Stars and GG aren't when I double checked this morning :)).

The counter-argument is obviously that if nobody else is running them we can be the "home of [insert niche format here] which is how things used to be but it doesn't really make much sense from a business POV. While we might get x players in to play that one niche tournament we could also use that spot to get run something more common and popular and get y players in. If y is greater than x, then it's not worth having the niche tournaments.

The only real way to find out if y is greater than x is to test it out, and that's what we're doing. If we/I get it wrong, we'll change some stuff back.

[Purps]

@Andy-Unibet

Ok. Fair enough. Thanks for the thorough answer 👍

I will still keep getting plo8 back to Unibet on my evening prayers though 🙂🙏

[Andy-Relax]

17 hours ago, DonkeyHunter said:

Hi! 🙂

This is a long one. I’m just going to list everything by numbering. Please feel free to let me know if you agree or disagree. Use the numbering to avoid any confusion.

1. I miss the old tournaments with different bounty ratios (Correct me if ratios are wrong here). This was as far as I know unique to Unibet, at least the number of different of ratios.

• Ice Giant                              50% bounty, 25% progressive
• Shooting Star                      50% bounty, 25% progressive
• Space madness bounty    90% bounty, 10% progressive
• Dwarf Star bounty              25% bounty, 25% progressive
• Supermoon                         50% bounty, 50% progressive

Why?

First, simply just because it keeps thing more interesting when every bounty tournament is not the same.
Second, regular players study the 50/50 PKO format because its the most common PKO format and recreational players don’t.
Third, in 50/50 PKO’s a too large fraction of the prize pool goes to 1st place compared to 2nd -9th.
Fourth, in PKO’s sort of the survival aspect of MTT’s is lost. A lower progressive value means more fold equity in later stages of the tournament. It would be nice to reintroduce fold equity to PKO tournaments (yes, this is a joke …. sort of). At the same time bounties are bigger early and makes thing more interesting early when stacks are deep.

 

2. The thing I really like about Unibet is the smaller fields which in the end means lower variance and they are less time consuming. You can finish a reg-speed tournament in 4 and not 10 hours. Overall, the feel of the new schedule is that there are less tournaments overall, but guarantees are larger.

3. This might be an unpopular opinion, however there is too much turbo in the new schedule. The old 8-min level tournaments were like the perfect semi turbo compromise between players that like normal speed tournaments and turbo players. There are 2 non-turbos between 20:05 and 00:30. I understand and agree with the goal to finish tournaments before 1AM. With the smaller fields of non-major tournaments, I don’t see how this is not possible. I just realized Fofty was changed from Turbo to 7min levels, a change in the right direction in my opinion. So that makes it 3 tournaments.

 

4. I think everything, at least most tournaments with level-up speed <= 6 min should be changed to 6-Max. There is a reason most hypers are 6-Max.

 

5. What happened to 9-Max PKO’s? There is not a good balance between 6-max and 9-max PKO’s in my opinion. I’ve seen others mention this on here as well ever since all the old “Falling Star” was replaced with “Shooting Star”. I suggest changing the Battleground to 9-Max. The Battleground, Title Fight and Slobberknocker is essentially the same tournament with different buy in level.

 

6. In lobbies of R/A tournaments the Add on field is empty. It would be useful to know how many chips add-on is compared to starting stack. If the purpose of that field is for something else, please add this information to the description text. Does this count as a bug?

 

7. More filler “vanilla” or PKO non-turbo tournaments. If they are lower buy in (please not nano), hopefully they dont steal attention from majors.

 

8. Let’s talk about Fofty. It is 1 of the 2 highest buy-in daily tournaments. Edges are lower because it’s a turbo and the field is slightly tougher, which is why I think a slower structure makes more sense. This tournament was the only major tournament to never meet the guarantee I think. Maybe the guarantee was simply too ambitious? My guess is that most spend their 50 euro in The Title Fight and all the turbo lovers play Bullet instead. But then again, not every tournament can be a favorite. I do like all of the non turbo majors so far and will probably play most of them whenever I start a session.

 

I'll reply in a random order because I think some of them can be bunched together.

2/3/7. Not sure if 2 is you being positive or negative :). Yes, there are less tournaments in the new schedule and it's by design.

There have often been comments in the past from players that they don't open the Unibet client because there is nothing to play, relative to other sites. When you look at the old schedule it's quite easy to see why, when the the biggest nightly was a 4k GTD €10 R/A. The rest of the schedule was filled with low GTD filler that were on par with 18 to 45 man SNGs on other sites. 

In order to try and redress that, we needed to try and make sure that the finite number of buy-ins customers had collectively each night stopped being spread so thin over too many tournaments and were more concentrated toward more tournaments we could promote. That's why the majors as a group exist, why all qualifiers only go to the them and why most promotional rewards going forward will also target them. We're never going to be able to compete with the GTDs of Stars and GG but as players get more savvy around lowering variance, bankroll management and rake we wanted to create something that would hopefully appeal to as many players as possible and really push what we could offer in terms of GTDs. Simply adding more filler is going to hurt that because it's going to take buy-ins away from the majors. If the site grows and more players turn up, we'll definitely add more as demand increases.

2/3 kind of contradict each other because you want tournaments that finish quick but you also don't want them to be turbo. The only way that works is if the field size is tiny and that's not good for us, and more importantly, for you. If the tournaments are not attractive, players don't come and play... and especially the players you want in the field. 

3 is an unpopular opinion I'm afraid, almost universally the opinions we've received is that players want tournaments to be quicker in general, speed up as the night goes along and for the fillers to be things they can add in while deep in big tournaments and not worry about committing to another 4-5 hours after busting the big tournament.

Having said that, we've only committed to the majors finishing around 1am so there may be some changes we can do to some of the fillers to slow them down a little since we're not under the same time constraints. It's something I'll have a look at next week.

1 is a nice easy one, consistency. As mentioned previously, the new schedule is about attracting new players and we want them to be as comfortable as possible when they start playing. The client itself is a little jarring if you've come from some of the other sites so adding the complexities of abnormal PKO formats seemed like a bad idea. 

I think some of your reason for 50/50 being bad are valid and some are not. Casual players don't study, period, so I don't see why the % really matters but they are used to getting 50% as a payout so it seems best to be consistent with that as much as possible. The payout issue will vary depending on bounty sizes remaining so regardless of the % there will be some variance and there is an argument that if the KO % is lower then we'd have to create a new payout structure that didn't pay 1st and 2nd equally to balance things out, confusing things more. All the PKOs are not deep with 200bb starting being the max so I don't think your last point is really relevant. There is no point playing 300bb deep in a bounty when the format is built for eliminations.

There will be various MTT series in 2023 and there will be events within those series where the buy-in split and/or the payout split will be changes to add the variety you're asking for. I'm not completely opposed to changing one or two of the fillers in the schedule to have different splits but I think keeping the majority in the same format just makes more sense for the time being.

4. 5-6 min tournaments are turbo. I could see an argument for 4min or less but why the turbos as well? That would create a major imbalance between 6 and 9-max in the schedule as a whole. It's also not something I've seen any competitors do.

5 is not intentional and something I can look at. There was a general consensus from the higher stakes players that they prefer 6-max to 9-max which is why it's leaned that way. PKOs in general work better when players play more hands so 6-max helps facilitate that.

6 is bug in the new release, the info should be there and it's being fixed but the addon is always going to be double the starting stack for now.

8. The GTD is probably too ambitious and/or we're not generating enough tickets for it. There was a request from the higher stakes community to add a faster tournament later in the evening so that's why it's there but initial feedback was it got a bit push/fold a bit fast so I added a minute to the levels.

We're also in a week where there are multiple live events running, including 2 sponsored by Unibet that we've sent players to so some of the week one overlay may disappear next week when everyone get's locked in for winter.

[startelver]

The majors are fine, I am sure I will play some of them.  However the structure is not to my liking, I prefer min 8 min levels, with a minimum buy-in of €5.    I can name at least 5 other poker rooms that offer better structure. 

 

[Kamon]

I like the new schedule. I'm happy for more bounty tournaments and less R/A tournaments. This schedule is almost perfect for me. (Maybe one thing what I dont like: There isn't any bounty tournaments with 1€ buy-in starting between 17:15 and 22:15 (CET). A lot of bounty tournaments with 1 € buy-in starts late night (22:15, 00:05, 01:05, 02:30 CET)

 

[DonkeyHunter]

On 10/29/2022 at 5:25 PM, Andy-Unibet said:

I'll reply in a random order because I think some of them can be bunched together.

2/3/7. Not sure if 2 is you being positive or negative :). Yes, there are less tournaments in the new schedule and it's by design.

There have often been comments in the past from players that they don't open the Unibet client because there is nothing to play, relative to other sites. When you look at the old schedule it's quite easy to see why, when the the biggest nightly was a 4k GTD €10 R/A. The rest of the schedule was filled with low GTD filler that were on par with 18 to 45 man SNGs on other sites. 

In order to try and redress that, we needed to try and make sure that the finite number of buy-ins customers had collectively each night stopped being spread so thin over too many tournaments and were more concentrated toward more tournaments we could promote. That's why the majors as a group exist, why all qualifiers only go to the them and why most promotional rewards going forward will also target them. We're never going to be able to compete with the GTDs of Stars and GG but as players get more savvy around lowering variance, bankroll management and rake we wanted to create something that would hopefully appeal to as many players as possible and really push what we could offer in terms of GTDs. Simply adding more filler is going to hurt that because it's going to take buy-ins away from the majors. If the site grows and more players turn up, we'll definitely add more as demand increases.

2/3 kind of contradict each other because you want tournaments that finish quick but you also don't want them to be turbo. The only way that works is if the field size is tiny and that's not good for us, and more importantly, for you. If the tournaments are not attractive, players don't come and play... and especially the players you want in the field. 

3 is an unpopular opinion I'm afraid, almost universally the opinions we've received is that players want tournaments to be quicker in general, speed up as the night goes along and for the fillers to be things they can add in while deep in big tournaments and not worry about committing to another 4-5 hours after busting the big tournament.

Having said that, we've only committed to the majors finishing around 1am so there may be some changes we can do to some of the fillers to slow them down a little since we're not under the same time constraints. It's something I'll have a look at next week.

1 is a nice easy one, consistency. As mentioned previously, the new schedule is about attracting new players and we want them to be as comfortable as possible when they start playing. The client itself is a little jarring if you've come from some of the other sites so adding the complexities of abnormal PKO formats seemed like a bad idea. 

I think some of your reason for 50/50 being bad are valid and some are not. Casual players don't study, period, so I don't see why the % really matters but they are used to getting 50% as a payout so it seems best to be consistent with that as much as possible. The payout issue will vary depending on bounty sizes remaining so regardless of the % there will be some variance and there is an argument that if the KO % is lower then we'd have to create a new payout structure that didn't pay 1st and 2nd equally to balance things out, confusing things more. All the PKOs are not deep with 200bb starting being the max so I don't think your last point is really relevant. There is no point playing 300bb deep in a bounty when the format is built for eliminations.

There will be various MTT series in 2023 and there will be events within those series where the buy-in split and/or the payout split will be changes to add the variety you're asking for. I'm not completely opposed to changing one or two of the fillers in the schedule to have different splits but I think keeping the majority in the same format just makes more sense for the time being.

4. 5-6 min tournaments are turbo. I could see an argument for 4min or less but why the turbos as well? That would create a major imbalance between 6 and 9-max in the schedule as a whole. It's also not something I've seen any competitors do.

5 is not intentional and something I can look at. There was a general consensus from the higher stakes players that they prefer 6-max to 9-max which is why it's leaned that way. PKOs in general work better when players play more hands so 6-max helps facilitate that.

6 is bug in the new release, the info should be there and it's being fixed but the addon is always going to be double the starting stack for now.

8. The GTD is probably too ambitious and/or we're not generating enough tickets for it. There was a request from the higher stakes community to add a faster tournament later in the evening so that's why it's there but initial feedback was it got a bit push/fold a bit fast so I added a minute to the levels.

We're also in a week where there are multiple live events running, including 2 sponsored by Unibet that we've sent players to so some of the week one overlay may disappear next week when everyone get's locked in for winter.

Thank you for the reply 🙂, here is another wall of text. 😂

 

2/3/7. 2 is positive and at the same time letting you know that I want a couple more tournaments to play. I guess large guarantees attract players and especially the weaker ones and therefore it makes sense from a business perspective to channel all the money into a fewer number of tournaments like you said. I don’t expect you to make decisions that don’t make sense. The downside could be that players who prefer to play many tables end up not playing at all.

 

2/3 I don’t think they contradict, because I don’t mind smaller fields. I’ve seen others mention this on here as well as the main reason they play on Unibet. One of the Classic tournaments yesterday had 72 entries, 8 min levels and finished in 3h 41min. Let’s assume I play every reg-speed between 17:05 and 20:05 in the range 2-25. That’s 10 tournaments, which I guess is reasonable. However, let’s say I don’t like Omaha for some reason, then its suddenly looking a little thin.

 

3. Could it be a factor that you receive more feedback from unhappy players, than happy players? I don’t know. You have the data. If most players want turbo, most tournaments should be turbo, I guess. But then again, its not like 8 min levels is some kind of super slow deepstack structure.

 

 

1.

1.1 It matters because it pushes regulars out of their comfort zone. They cannot just auto pilot apply the same standard bounty math or take advantage of their experience. I don’t think it matter much to recreational what the ratios are.

1.2 The payout distribution. Here is comparison between yesterday’s Ironman (370 entries, 11.89% ITM) in green and Title Fight (255 entries, 9.41% ITM) in red. I have calculated the payouts as a percentage of the total prize pool for positions 1st – 10th. Here is the distribution:

As you can see the PKO's are very top heavy. And because of that you lose some of the survival aspect. Here are the percentages for reference.

Ironman [20.46, 14.60, 10.73, 7.85, 5.86, 4.33, 3.18, 2.26, 1.63, 1.27]

Title Fight [22.62, 11.66, 8.03, 6.48, 4.78, 3.19, 1.62, 2.66, 1.20, 3.14]

1.3 I don’t think you have to create a new payout structure. 1st win their own bounty + bounty of 2nd place finisher so there will still be a difference. However, on average 1st and 2nd will be closer.

1.4 My argument is not that PKO's should be 200bb++ deep. However, if bounties are bigger early it would give more incentive to loosen up a bit when stacks are deeper. Consider a €25 PKO. When bounties are 12.50 you win 6.25 (25% of buy-in) in the standard version. In the 25% progressive version you win 0.75x12.50 = 9.375 (37.50% of buy-in). Bounties are 50% bigger early (9.375/6.25 = 1.50). Maybe it would be interesting if one of the bounty majors were a little different? The majority can be 50/50

 

4. For the same reason hypers should be 6-Max. 9-handed turbo/hyper feel very push/fold. That's not interesting at all, when most all-ins is a flip and there is no post flop play. Why not just play a FLIP tournament? 9-Max play tighter than 6-Max, and because blinds increase more rapidly its most of the time a push.
If you change Bullet and Session Saver to 6-max, you can balance it back by changing one of the bounty tournaments to 9-Max.

 

5. Fair enough. I’m not against 6-Max and I will play the tournament regardless. In fact, I don’t mind if majority of tournaments are 6-Max. All I’m saying is maybe one of them can be 9-handed, because there is no 9-Max PKO.

 

8. That makes sense.

 

I guess I should probably add a couple thing I like about the new schedule.
1.    The lower rake.
2.    Tournaments finish before 1AM. I still think this is late for someone who have work in the morning, but I guess it’s possible to skip a couple tournaments and still finish in a reasonable time.
3.    6-Max Omaha.
4.    Except for a couple things I mention in this post, I think the majors are fine.

 

[dc10FTW]

the 10e 2.5k gtd Cage PKO Mtt might just be the most amazing tournament ever created in this or any other galaxy in the entire Universe....just mesmerizing....the Title Fight not too shabby either ❤️ ....

[ladyluckpls]

Great job on the new schedule, the RA's where indeed bad news for recreationals since the abi went up drastically with pretty low payouts.

I only have 2 things I would like to discuss:

1) the payout structure seems  super topheavy, first takes a huge chunck and since the target are recreationals, can't this be topped off? I mean, especially since there is no option for dealmaking. I have played in the past on another site that had dealmaking options inbedded in the client, people would vote and see the icm chop before accepting or not..

 

2) the satties were redesigned with no RA's which is good  and benefit the recs but now they take way too long and feel more like a mtt before the mtt, I mean 1h30 with 40 players for 3 tickets... and only other option is hypers pfff. 

[Andy-Relax]

38 minutes ago, ladyluckpls said:

Great job on the new schedule, the RA's where indeed bad news for recreationals since the abi went up drastically with pretty low payouts.

I only have 2 things I would like to discuss:

1) the payout structure seems  super topheavy, first takes a huge chunck and since the target are recreationals, can't this be topped off? I mean, especially since there is no option for dealmaking. I have played in the past on another site that had dealmaking options inbedded in the client, people would vote and see the icm chop before accepting or not..

 

2) the satties were redesigned with no RA's which is good  and benefit the recs but now they take way too long and feel more like a mtt before the mtt, I mean 1h30 with 40 players for 3 tickets... and only other option is hypers pfff. 

For 1, I agree and I'll be fixing it today. There are two bounty payout options in the BO and turns out one is a bit more extreme than the other. I'll fix all the affected tournaments today and it'll take affect from tomorrow. @DonkeyHunteralso mentioned this so thanks for bringing it to my attention.

We don't have the functionality in the client to facilitate deals at this time. 

For 2, there are sats of different speeds throughout the schedule so you should find something comparable to the old schedule.

The slower qualifiers are basically 6 min levels and the hypers are 4 min so there isn't really much room in between. Looking at the old "Qualifier to €10 2 TIX" generic qualifiers, they ran for about an hour and were 4 min levels with 3k (100bb) starting, so hypers as well. Looking at the generic 2 ticket qualifiers (6 min) we are running now, they're lasting 1h-1h 15min so there really isn't much difference between them. 

We're trying to GTD more tickets in the qualifiers which will ultimately mean they run longer.

[Trophies]

Would be nice if there was a bit more time to act in hypers before u hit ur timebank. It's too easy to sit out in these when multitabling.

[Stubbe-Unibet]

16 minutes ago, Trophies said:

Would be nice if there was a bit more time to act in hypers before u hit ur timebank. It's too easy to sit out in these when multitabling.

Just putting this here for reference:

Preflop TTA:

• Hyper: 10 seconds
• Regular: 15 seconds
• Slow: 20 seconds

Post-flop TTA:

• Hyper: 12 seconds
• Regular: 15 seconds
• Slow: 20 seconds

I agree that it's a bit aggressive for hypers, but this is intentional. I believe these times are pretty perfect for recreational players. Of course, if you're playing many tables/sites, it can be an issue. Perhaps a compromise can be made for now, with a slightly bigger timebank in at least the hyper qualifiers for slower tournaments. @Andy-Unibet

[Iceman]

7 hours ago, Stubbe-Unibet said:

Just putting this here for reference:

Preflop TTA:

• Hyper: 10 seconds
• Regular: 15 seconds
• Slow: 20 seconds

Post-flop TTA:

• Hyper: 12 seconds
• Regular: 15 seconds
• Slow: 20 seconds

I agree that it's a bit aggressive for hypers, but this is intentional. I believe these times are pretty perfect for recreational players. Of course, if you're playing many tables/sites, it can be an issue. Perhaps a compromise can be made for now, with a slightly bigger timebank in at least the hyper qualifiers for slower tournaments. @Andy-Unibet

Please don't change TTA or timebank. There are enough multitabling regs who make game very slow. Ofc I am multitabling too and it's busy sometimes but to be honest if I use timebank, 9 times out of 10 it's intentional stalling or slowroll

[Andy-Relax]

On 10/31/2022 at 7:50 PM, DonkeyHunter said:

Thank you for the reply 🙂, here is another wall of text. 😂

 

2/3/7. 2 is positive and at the same time letting you know that I want a couple more tournaments to play. I guess large guarantees attract players and especially the weaker ones and therefore it makes sense from a business perspective to channel all the money into a fewer number of tournaments like you said. I don’t expect you to make decisions that don’t make sense. The downside could be that players who prefer to play many tables end up not playing at all.

 

2/3 I don’t think they contradict, because I don’t mind smaller fields. I’ve seen others mention this on here as well as the main reason they play on Unibet. One of the Classic tournaments yesterday had 72 entries, 8 min levels and finished in 3h 41min. Let’s assume I play every reg-speed between 17:05 and 20:05 in the range 2-25. That’s 10 tournaments, which I guess is reasonable. However, let’s say I don’t like Omaha for some reason, then its suddenly looking a little thin.

 

3. Could it be a factor that you receive more feedback from unhappy players, than happy players? I don’t know. You have the data. If most players want turbo, most tournaments should be turbo, I guess. But then again, its not like 8 min levels is some kind of super slow deepstack structure.

 

 

1.

1.1 It matters because it pushes regulars out of their comfort zone. They cannot just auto pilot apply the same standard bounty math or take advantage of their experience. I don’t think it matter much to recreational what the ratios are.

1.2 The payout distribution. Here is comparison between yesterday’s Ironman (370 entries, 11.89% ITM) in green and Title Fight (255 entries, 9.41% ITM) in red. I have calculated the payouts as a percentage of the total prize pool for positions 1st – 10th. Here is the distribution:

As you can see the PKO's are very top heavy. And because of that you lose some of the survival aspect. Here are the percentages for reference.

Ironman [20.46, 14.60, 10.73, 7.85, 5.86, 4.33, 3.18, 2.26, 1.63, 1.27]

Title Fight [22.62, 11.66, 8.03, 6.48, 4.78, 3.19, 1.62, 2.66, 1.20, 3.14]

1.3 I don’t think you have to create a new payout structure. 1st win their own bounty + bounty of 2nd place finisher so there will still be a difference. However, on average 1st and 2nd will be closer.

1.4 My argument is not that PKO's should be 200bb++ deep. However, if bounties are bigger early it would give more incentive to loosen up a bit when stacks are deeper. Consider a €25 PKO. When bounties are 12.50 you win 6.25 (25% of buy-in) in the standard version. In the 25% progressive version you win 0.75x12.50 = 9.375 (37.50% of buy-in). Bounties are 50% bigger early (9.375/6.25 = 1.50). Maybe it would be interesting if one of the bounty majors were a little different? The majority can be 50/50

 

4. For the same reason hypers should be 6-Max. 9-handed turbo/hyper feel very push/fold. That's not interesting at all, when most all-ins is a flip and there is no post flop play. Why not just play a FLIP tournament? 9-Max play tighter than 6-Max, and because blinds increase more rapidly its most of the time a push.
If you change Bullet and Session Saver to 6-max, you can balance it back by changing one of the bounty tournaments to 9-Max.

 

5. Fair enough. I’m not against 6-Max and I will play the tournament regardless. In fact, I don’t mind if majority of tournaments are 6-Max. All I’m saying is maybe one of them can be 9-handed, because there is no 9-Max PKO.

 

8. That makes sense.

 

I guess I should probably add a couple thing I like about the new schedule.
1.    The lower rake.
2.    Tournaments finish before 1AM. I still think this is late for someone who have work in the morning, but I guess it’s possible to skip a couple tournaments and still finish in a reasonable time.
3.    6-Max Omaha.
4.    Except for a couple things I mention in this post, I think the majors are fine.

 

It does sound like you're talking about a very specific and small subset of players that only play reg speed, non-qualifiers. The idea that someone would go from playing the schedule to not because there are 1-2 less tournaments to play seems extreme but ultimately if we end up getting reactivated or new players that go from 0 to x tournaments and existing players to add additional tournaments to their sessions then it's a trade off that we're willing to make if population prefers the schedule the way it is.

The turbo changes are not just customer feedback, it's industry trend. Other sites are moving towards this structure as well and they have many more customers and data to back up the change. The feedback isn't really that people don't like slow tournaments either, it's just that they want them to be quicker at the end of the night. I wouldn't say that's unhappy feedback, more of a suggestion we implemented.

As mentioned in an earlier post, payouts in PKOs that are 6-max will be flattened from today.

I'll change a couple of the filler PKOs to non standard for a bit of variety.

There are a lot of contradictions going with the rest of your post. You don't like turbos/hypers but want changes to them, you think 9-max is tight yet you want PKOs, a format that favours action, that are 9-max. It's all very confusing.

Having said that, I've changed the Battle Royale to 9-max since there are two €5 6-max PKO majors and slowed down the €10 €400 Freezeout PKO so it's not turbo. I can't change the Cage to 9-max because it's 6 min levels and all turbos should be 6-max right? 🙂 Battlegrounds is a copy of the Ice Giant that always did well so don't see a reason to change that either.

For new point 2, it's around or before 1am and most are finishing before. If you want them to finish even earlier then we need to lower the level times and that doesn't seem like something you'd want so you're asking for the impossible really.

Appreciate the feedback, nice to be able to look at it on a more granular level. 

[FeelsBadMan]

On 10/31/2022 at 8:50 PM, DonkeyHunter said:

As you can see the PKO's are very top heavy. And because of that you lose some of the survival aspect. Here are the percentages for reference.

Ironman [20.46, 14.60, 10.73, 7.85, 5.86, 4.33, 3.18, 2.26, 1.63, 1.27]

Title Fight [22.62, 11.66, 8.03, 6.48, 4.78, 3.19, 1.62, 2.66, 1.20, 3.14]

IMO PKOs don't need the same level of survival imperative baked into them as normal tournaments, because that's how you end up with people getting into top 5 consistently with 0 or 1 bounties. They're missing the whole point of the tournament and a large part of the fun and EV, they're supposed to go for bounties and create action. Obviously you can't go too far in the opposite direction either like the 90% bounty tournaments where getting far is pointless, that's no longer a tournament, just flinging bounties at eachother. The current iteration has great incentives to both go for bounties and for late game survival which always have to be weighed against each other when deep, and that made for some really fun tournaments the past week, with some great final table dynamics.  Also due to these being PKO's it would feel kinda crummy to be paid slightly above half the buyin for cashing as opposed to regular tournaments where at least you get more than you paid for it, so I think it would make sense to have a bit less people paid in PKOs, to have it be a bit more satisfying. 

A little bit more flat, sure, that can be reasonable (personally I've enjoyed them the way there are now), just not too much, which I assume is what you want too, only mentioning it because feedback has a habit to be applied to the extremes, like a few people asked for addons, Eeeeevrything became an addon, a few people wanted 6max, eeeverything became a 6max 😅

[DonkeyHunter]

13 hours ago, Andy-Unibet said:

It does sound like you're talking about a very specific and small subset of players that only play reg speed, non-qualifiers. The idea that someone would go from playing the schedule to not because there are 1-2 less tournaments to play seems extreme but ultimately if we end up getting reactivated or new players that go from 0 to x tournaments and existing players to add additional tournaments to their sessions then it's a trade off that we're willing to make if population prefers the schedule the way it is.

Ok, so first of. I do think you did you great job on the new schedule. It does seem the site is more popular than ever.
That example was just another way of saying there are only 7 reg-speed NLHE in that time window. In comparison, Stars has almost triple that in the same time window.
It’s not the subset that only plays reg speed I have in mind, but rather they prefer and play reg speed for the most part.
If players pick the most attractive tournament (highest GTD), does it really matter if there is an equivalent tournament with a smaller GTD. Don’t you think the higher GTD will be prio for most anyways? I think we agree that adding 10 more tournaments is too much, however maybe there is space for 1 or 2 more? Having said that, it’s not a huge dealbreaker if you don’t. The fact that you can re-enter might be a factor I didn’t take into consideration.

13 hours ago, Andy-Unibet said:

The turbo changes are not just customer feedback, it's industry trend. Other sites are moving towards this structure as well and they have many more customers and data to back up the change. The feedback isn't really that people don't like slow tournaments either, it's just that they want them to be quicker at the end of the night. I wouldn't say that's unhappy feedback, more of a suggestion we implemented.

I agree with all of that. The only reason I really brought it up is because I was worried "everything" would eventually turn into turbos.

13 hours ago, Andy-Unibet said:

As mentioned in an earlier post, payouts in PKOs that are 6-max will be flattened from today.

Very nice to see, I think that’s a very good decision. The top-heavy structure of 50/50 is the main issue I have with them. The bounty ratios are one way to change that and why I was arguing for 25% progressive.

13 hours ago, Andy-Unibet said:

I'll change a couple of the filler PKOs to non standard for a bit of variety.

Interesting, which ones?

13 hours ago, Andy-Unibet said:

There are a lot of contradictions going with the rest of your post. You don't like turbos/hypers but want changes to them, you think 9-max is tight yet you want PKOs, a format that favours action, that are 9-max. It's all very confusing.

I don’t see the contradictions. Maybe I have been unclear. I was trying to avoid my post turning into a book.
I do play turbos, I just play less of them. My least favorite is the 9-handed turbo and I think I have made it clear why. However, I do think it’s a bit more reasonable when levels are 6 and 7 min (Yes 7 min is technically not turbo). I did for instance play the old 9 handed Unidentified Object with 6 min levels.

If I wasn’t clear about it, I do think the 6-Max PKO's are great tournaments. The only reason for having one 9-Max is variety really.

13 hours ago, Andy-Unibet said:

Having said that, I've changed the Battle Royale to 9-max since there are two €5 6-max PKO majors and slowed down the €10 €400 Freezeout PKO so it's not turbo.

Nice, I assume you mean the €5 (not €10) at 20.30? It still has the "T" tag, dont forget to remove that. 99 entries on the first day is pretty good for a freezeout. Did you change the start time forward?

13 hours ago, Andy-Unibet said:

I can't change the Cage to 9-max because it's 6 min levels and all turbos should be 6-max right? 🙂

Haha 😂, you are right.

13 hours ago, Andy-Unibet said:

Battlegrounds is a copy of the Ice Giant that always did well so don't see a reason to change that either.

Ice giant was 25% progressive btw. Is this you giving credit to 25% PKO's? 😉

13 hours ago, Andy-Unibet said:

For new point 2, it's around or before 1am and most are finishing before. If you want them to finish even earlier then we need to lower the level times and that doesn't seem like something you'd want so you're asking for the impossible really.

This wasn’t really a complaint. Was just pointing out that it can be possible to finish earlier by skipping like 1 or 2 tournaments, because most finish before like you said.

13 hours ago, Andy-Unibet said:

Appreciate the feedback, nice to be able to look at it on a more granular level. 

Thank you for taking my feedback into consideration. I take that the changes you made means at least some of my arguments make sense.

Edited November 2, 2022 by DonkeyHunter

[DonkeyHunter]

9 hours ago, FeelsBadMan said:

IMO PKOs don't need the same level of survival imperative baked into them as normal tournaments, because that's how you end up with people getting into top 5 consistently with 0 or 1 bounties. They're missing the whole point of the tournament and a large part of the fun and EV, they're supposed to go for bounties and create action. Obviously you can't go too far in the opposite direction either like the 90% bounty tournaments where getting far is pointless, that's no longer a tournament, just flinging bounties at eachother. The current iteration has great incentives to both go for bounties and for late game survival which always have to be weighed against each other when deep, and that made for some really fun tournaments the past week, with some great final table dynamics.  Also due to these being PKO's it would feel kinda crummy to be paid slightly above half the buyin for cashing as opposed to regular tournaments where at least you get more than you paid for it, so I think it would make sense to have a bit less people paid in PKOs, to have it be a bit more satisfying. 

A little bit more flat, sure, that can be reasonable (personally I've enjoyed them the way there are now), just not too much, which I assume is what you want too, only mentioning it because feedback has a habit to be applied to the extremes, like a few people asked for addons, Eeeeevrything became an addon, a few people wanted 6max, eeeverything became a 6max 😅

Appreciate the input.

PKO's are slightly less about survival than regular tournaments and I accept that. Consider the extreme case where first place takes entire prize pool. That would completely change everything.

Compared to regular tournaments PKO's have been a lot more top heavy, which I think is the main issue. The non-bounty part of the distribution has now been tweaked, a very good decision IMO. The min cash is still greater than buy in like you mentioned and I think that’s fair. PKO's will remain more top heavy but the difference is not that brutal. Because 1st win their own bounty, we are often still going to see 1st = 2x2nd. The only way to even it further would be to adjust the bounty % and/or the progressive % unless I am missing something.

[Andy-Relax]

9 hours ago, DonkeyHunter said:

That example was just another way of saying there are only 7 reg-speed NLHE in that time window. In comparison, Stars has almost triple that in the same time window.

I don't there is any relevance in comparing the Stars schedule (or GG, Party, 888 or anyone else with a big global footprint) to ours. I imagine Stars have 50x or more of the player pool at peak EU time and they also have the Americas (I expect Brazil is now their biggest market after closing Russia) so they can run a schedule that's basically a copy/paste every few hours. Stars ran just over 90 regular schedule tournaments in peak EU time when I checked at the start of the year.

The closest thing to a direct comparison is going to be the iPoker network as that contains a number of Euro focused sites and is much closer in terms of size. When I checked their schedule in Feb/Mar time they had 35 regular schedule tournaments between 17:00 and 23:00 CET. We currently have 39. 

 

9 hours ago, DonkeyHunter said:

Nice, I assume you mean the €5 (not €10) at 20.30? It still has the "T" tag, dont forget to remove that. 99 entries on the first day is pretty good for a freezeout. Did you change the start time forward?

Yeah, meant the €5. Tag is removed from the template, just forgot yesterdays active tournament. Start time didn't move but if you slow a tournament down, you increase the late reg time, which gives players more time to get in so it's not surprising it got more entrants. I don't think an assumption can be made that it now looks like a more appealing tournament. 

9 hours ago, DonkeyHunter said:

Ice giant was 25% progressive btw. Is this you giving credit to 25% PKO's?

It's been a long time since I played on Unibet as a player so I'd forgotten all the old bounty payouts were weird 🙂. I was referencing the structure/players per table rather than the bounty setup.

 

9 hours ago, DonkeyHunter said:

Interesting, which ones?

I haven't gotten to a point of deciding yet. Just to confirm, you're only talking about the bounty payout being something other than 50/50 and not the buy-in split between bounty and prizepool? 

70/30 (bounty/prizepool) buy-in split with 50/50 bounty payouts

vs

50/50 (bounty/prizepool) buy-in split with 70/30 (bounty/cash) bounty payouts

 

 

[Emerald]

On 10/26/2022 at 11:16 PM, GotKot99 said:

Only negative aspect (besides not winning) is that it starts quite late, so one has to stay awake long into the night especially if getting to the final table. On a positive note, the tournament still finished under three hours; still could start like 1-2 hour earlier if only possible.

I would like that too! 👍

[pianocat88]

On 10/24/2022 at 8:07 PM, Andy-Unibet said:

If the players support the qualifiers then the GTDs will grow. Nothing is fixed here but I'd rather go up than down.

There has to be a reason for us to intentionally offer tournaments that overlay. There has to be a means to an end. Generic qualifiers for tickets that can be used on any tournament do not do that. Taking up schedule space with 3 different Nano buy-in levels doesn't do it either. The Nanos in general don't really do that. When I looked at the data, players were not moving up and were happy to live rent (rake) free while Unibet took the cost.

As Jerry said previously, the 20c tournaments for 4 and 6 1 euro generic tickets very rarely overlaid, if at all. So even though they were rake-free, I can't see that they really cost Unibet anything. Your data may be including some of the other less popular nano tournaments that didn't often break guarantee.

I don't think anyone here is saying "give us generic ticket qualifiers that overlay". I think they're saying "give us generic ticket qualifiers".

😺

[Stubbe-Unibet]

1 hour ago, pianocat88 said:

As Jerry said previously, the 20c tournaments for 4 and 6 1 euro generic tickets very rarely overlaid, if at all. So even though they were rake-free, I can't see that they really cost Unibet anything. Your data may be including some of the other less popular nano tournaments that didn't often break guarantee.

I don't think anyone here is saying "give us generic ticket qualifiers that overlay". I think they're saying "give us generic ticket qualifiers".

😺

Just because Jerry said it, it doesn't mean it's true 😉

The two qualifiers you are talking about had around 2k cost this year. As Andy has also made clear, it's not just about the historical cost. Adding these would likely increase the cost on existing schedule at this buyin level; the more tournaments, the less buyin amount per tournament.

[Dragoo]

Hi, They were good even in the old schedule. Please bring back the favorite of many, "Mr. Gorsky", which I think, was one of the best tournament structures here. But rather with €800 GTD, because the overlay would induce even more entries.

I think a lot of people liked the addon races, and with that there were more late reg
For example, a new €1 R/A Turbo tournament, say at 20:00, with 3x 4x or rather 5x Mega ADD-ON would be nice. (Like a few years ago on stars, it was similar, with thousands of entries.)

[Stubbe-Unibet]

30 minutes ago, Dragoo said:

Hi, They were good even in the old schedule. Please bring back the favorite of many, "Mr. Gorsky", which I think, was one of the best tournament structures here. But rather with €800 GTD, because the overlay would induce even more entries.

I think a lot of people liked the addon races, and with that there were more late reg
For example, a new €1 R/A Turbo tournament, say at 20:00, with 3x 4x or rather 5x Mega ADD-ON would be nice. (Like a few years ago on stars, it was similar, with thousands of entries.)

Yes, some people - not a lot - like addon tournaments. However:

"More bounties and less addon. We have historically been one of the sites - if not the site - with the highest share of addon tournaments, and we know that some of you will not appreciate this change. However, addon is a flawed format which puts the recreational players at a further disadvantage, as it's unfortunately quite common for players not to realize the value in taking the addon. It's also a format which encourages players to max late reg, and generally speaking it just doesn't make for a nice tournament experience for the inexperienced player. Again, I know these downsides are actual positives to some of you, and we will continue to offer the format, it's just not one we'll push unknowing players into by highlighting the tournaments and making them the biggest ones we offer."

I think it's safe to say now that we were 100% right to make this shift. The €4000 Titan, which used to be the biggest daily tournament, is struggling with a €2,000 GTD (only twice the last week has it exceeded the GTD).
It never was the case the players were so hungry for addon tournaments, but there are obviously some players that really like them - just like there are players that like Banzai bounty, ante tournaments etc. 

I'm very much against doing 3x,4x or 5x addon. I'd rather change all addon tournaments to be 1.5x, but this is not something we're actively discussing 🙂 

[Dragoo]

I don't think so, but if you also play poker (as a recreational player) then you would also like more addons. Just try it, please.

I think the majority here do not express their opinion (only 1-2 regular players), because they do not even know about the Unibet Community.
But at least there should be an exception, and please put Mr. Gorsky back.
And there could be more additional races on the weekend. Recreational players really like addons.

Edited November 6, 2022 by Dragoo

[GothMoth]

12 minutes ago, Dragoo said:

"I don't think so, but if you also play poker (as a recreational player) then you would also like more addons."

@Dragoo why then there are so many  players which never learned for so several years not to skip the add-on (~10% in low MTTs).

I guess it's mostly the recs which make this mistake - used to the auto add-on elsewhere. That's why I think they don't care about them as it should and couldn't like more of them.