MTT League IV feedback thread

[MoreTBC]

You all know by now if there is anything MTT related on Unibet I'm going to have a moan about it :) I will start by saying the prizes are, as always, excellent and I'm very excited to take part and finish somewhere in the low 90's at the end of the month 🆒

[rant]

I think the low league has too many qualifying tournaments in it. I played last night for the first time with the sole intention of just playing qualifying events and spent most of the night with at least 6 tables open. Especially in the low league this seems like a negative for recreational players that are not used to multi-tabling and also to anyone using the web clients as they can't even open that many. I think the spread of formats and speeds is good but I just think there needs to be less of them.

Even with 4 events on the low schedule, 3 NLH and a PLO, you are giving players 120 chances to score points in the month while not requiring them to 6 table every day to maximize their chances.

Looking at the schedule, but not having played it, I would think the €10 level is probably in the same boat as there are no Hyper events that will end quickly so you could have every event on the schedule  (maybe not the first Turbo) running if you went deep in the early ones.  

I also think some of the bigger dailies should not be included and it should have been used as a way to boost numbers in smaller events that run each day. Everyone is already playing the Daily 4 and the €1 deepstack so it would have been a good chance to boost some of the lower GTD events by only including them and skipping the bigs.

 

My second issue is that there is no way to tell from the client if a MTT is part of the league. Having to flick back and forth to a web browser when you already have 6 tables open to check if the event you are about to reg is a qualifying one is not very fun. Even if there was a * at the start of the event name or something like that to highlight them it would make life a lot easier. I'm not sure if colour coding in the lobby will happen in 2.0 but it would certainly help with promos like this IMO.

[/rant]

I've not had a proper look at the points formula yet but knowing me I will at some point and then complain about it being too top heavy and rewarding a single 1st in a big field more than consistant final tables in lower fields :geek:

 

 Anyone else have any thoughts? 

[GotWhatItTakes]

I think you are totally right about finding the MTTs that qualify for the league. A unique sign like "* # ! %" would simplify the search tremendously.

I think you need a lot of MTTs in the low section because Unibet wants to make some money. If there were less Unibet might not be able to give so much money away for finishing well in the low leaderboard. Besides, you can choose to play only the bigger events since there are way more points to be won. For example 1st place in the Daily4 would accumulate way more points than several final tables in smaller events with player fields in the range of 20, 30, 40.

In case of the High Leaderboard, we will see how things develop over time. The edges are a lot smaller in the 10€/25€ MTTs so in the end the leaderboard might be very close. If you ask me, they should close the high leaderboard instantly and pay the money out now 😏 (but obviously not because I am ranked #1 at the very moment 🤣) 

[MoreTBC]

Ok, I did the points thing (turns out I'm not very busy at work :))

Let's get the math discrepancy out the way first. If you look at Player 1 there are a number of times he earns 1 point even though he did not finish in the top 50% . This is because I formatted the cells to show no decimal places so Excel is automatically rounding up. , how does the software deal with this? Does it just not calculate points for anyone outside the top 50%? Internally do you have decimal places but not show them on the leader board? Regardless of my geeky questions lets assume these points totals are rough for the example and you can +/-10 points or so from either Player. Buy ins were chosen at random for the first 15 events and then just copied because I'm lazy and the entrants were roughly based on my not patented "The lower the buy-in, the higher the entrants" scale. Again, these were just mirrored after the first 15 for speed.

Player 1 and 2 both play 30 events in the month and they play exactly the same events. I'm fully aware this is not going to happen but it's just to give you a rough idea of how the points would pan out. Player 1 finishes 1st in 7 events and then does not record any more top 50% finishes for the whole month.

Player 2 finishes in the top 10 of all 30 events that count towards his points total including 4 2nd and 3rd place finishes 

Player 1 has more points :wow:

I'll be the first to admit that the table can be manipulated however you want to make the points skewed in the favour of whichever side you're arguing but these were chosen completely at random, honestly. I actually had player 1 winning 15 events to start and had to reel it back to 7 to get close to player 2 points score.

This just doesn't seem very fair to the players that play well all month to me. Maybe I'm old fashioned and rewarding consistency isn't a thing anymore but if I'm player 2 and have played grade A, consistent poker for a month and top 10'd 30 events I'm going to feel hard done by not getting placed above someone that finished 1 or 2 places above me in less than a 3rd of the events we've both played.

I've attached a copy of the spreadsheet I made so you can play about with it if you really want to see what would happen in various scenarios or even if you want to keep track of your points. You can't attach spreadsheets apparently. I'll stick it in a dropbox link if anyone needs it.

 

[MoreTBC]

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@GotWhatItTakes wrote:

I think you need a lot of MTTs in the low section because Unibet wants to make some money. If there were less Unibet might not be able to give so much money away for finishing well in the low leaderboard. Besides, you can choose to play only the bigger events since there are way more points to be won. For example 1st place in the Daily4 would accumulate way more points than several final tables in smaller events with player fields in the range of 20, 30, 40.

 

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I would have thought they have a budget in place already for the promo and generating rake to cover it wouldn't be much of a concern. If it was, then surely promoting MTTs that have less players on average (and less generated rake) would create additional money. If a player always plays the Daily 4 when he logs in and then finds he can play a PLO bounty as part of the league I would have thought they are more likely to play both rather than moving from the Daily 4 to the qualifying event.

I would also think anyone wanting to make a real go at getting the top spot is going to play as many events as possible to maximize their chances. 

[Farseer]

Why there's no marketing for this. This is first time I hear of this race. Didn't notice in lobby, and no e-mail notification or anything came by, didn't even notice although usually rolling through 2+2 Unibet thread?

I just play 99% MTTs (mainly other sites because Unibet MTTs are far too small, highly raked and current software is worse and unstable in comparison to other sites) and would have played probably some 30+ tournaments to do this. Now skipping altogether since missed too many days and travelling a week so can't do it. 

Huge mistake with promoting imo.

[FeelsBadMan]

I disagree about the number of qualifying tournaments, I think it's way better to have a decent selection for people to choose what to play compared to lets say 4 tournaments 2 PLO 2 NLH and as NLH is more popular lets say a rec will only bother with those 2 , but one of them is 4x mega extra turbo, or a deepstack that lasts till 2 AM so maybe the rec won't bother with this either, so alot of the time he will be left with 1 or 0 qualifying tournaments per day that he will want to play, and that can lead to him just saying fk it and skipping the league allthogheter. 

Having 10 tournaments in the low league ain't that bad, especially since 5 are turbo so they will end pretty fast, and they are spread over a few hours. And if some times you will run super good and have too many tables, there is always the option to not register the next one and concentrate on the final tables. Yes a rec probably won't be able to play every single one of them every single day to maximize his chances, but most of them wouldn't do that anyway, grinders do that. Ultimately the grinders that can't play a ton of tables are the most affected, because they want to maximize their chances but they're not used to the volume, especially the ones that want to play everything in multiple leagues to maximize their chances. Personally I'm going for all 3 leagues, and playing other games on unibet at the same time, so I was a bit worried about the number of games, and that the bulk of them start in only a 3 hour timespan, but it turns out that alot of them end really fast so there rarely is any point where there are way too many tables to handle. And the big selection of games allows me to skip a few, like some of the omaha games I really don't enjoy playing, or the 1€ deepstack that ends way too late. So even from the grinders persepctive it's pretty cool as long as you don't bite more than you can chew :) . Maybe having them a bit more spread apart like a couple of later turbos, and a couple starting earlier (same number in total) .

 

As for the points system, I agree that the point differences are pretty high, like the fact that 1'st place gets double the points of 2'nd place seems a bit extreme. I have mixed feelings about it since it makes variance pretty high but ultimately I think it does benefit both me and the lucksack playing a small number of tournaments, but I can see this formula becoming a huge problem as Unibet grows and the fields get bigger. Like the small tournaments would end up not even mattering, and some really big ones might just decide the winners, and that wouldn't really be a league anymore if 1'st place in a single tournament wins the league :) , but fortunately that is not the case just yet. 

 

And yeah the league tournaments should have a way to tell them apart, maybe a filter for the league, alot of people don't even know there's a league going on or what tournaments are eligible, the league isn't even in the website promos section  on some of the local versions. But for people that are already playing, to make registering easier (if you're playing multiple leagues) you can just put all the tournaments in excel and sort by time, then register them in order, or set up a google calendar and you get a notification of when they start. 

 

As for the bigger guarantees, again mixed feelings, I like the influx of players and the prizepool increasing 🆗 , but dislike the inconsistency they give to the leaderboard. 

[ChapInAChair]

I'm with  here. I did play the mid league games and the low league games on Wednesday alongside the UO50, UK25s and Sunday Entitled sats and there was a point where I was 9 tabling, which is a bit more than I'd like but is fine if you're trying to grind them out. I've decided not to bother with the low league now though simply because I don't think €2 and €4MTTs are usually the best use of my screen space.

I got a 2nd, 2nd and 4th in €10MTTs on Wednesday (thin brag) and was amazed when I saw that I was only fifth. Then I checked the formula! I don't really mind it as long as I know that's how it's going to be, though I probably would prefer it to be a little bit flatter if given the choice.

[ChapInAChair]

Forgot to add +1 for being able to pick out the league tournies in the lobby.

[Sect7G]

As  said the lack of promotion is a mistake.  A simple email each and every month outlining the promos for that month would go a long way in helping to bolster the player pool.  It's cheap marketing so I don't see why Unibet doesn't do this monthly.  I have had a few of these monthly emails... but they should be more consistant.

[Andrew]

I'm going to leave the actual feedback to one side, as it's better that Robin or David respond than me, as they designed the promotion.  But:

@Sect7G wrote:

As @Farseer said the lack of promotion is a mistake.  A simple email each and every month outlining the promos for that month would go a long way in helping to bolster the player pool.  It's cheap marketing so I don't see why Unibet doesn't do this monthly.  I have had a few of these monthly emails... but they should be more consistant.

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They're MEANT to happen every month.  I can't see which did and did not go out until Monday, but I'm definitely going to be shouting at the people involved if they didn't send them.

[MoreTBC]

I've not had a poker related email from Unibet in months.

[MoreTBC]

, my example of 4 events is too low, you are right. You would need at least 6 in order to make it well rounded and to fit everyone in the low league. Kudos on trying to compete in them all, anything over 6 tables on Unibet tilts me because of the forced window sizing.

I'm not sure what you mean about the following:-

"As for the bigger guarantees, again mixed feelings, I like the influx of players and the prizepool increasing, but dislike the inconsistency they give to the leaderboard."

The way I saw it was if you only included events that were  < €150 GTD currently for example in the low league you would hopefully boost their prizepools for the month and players may enjoy them and continute playing them after November. It shouldn't affect the big gtds, like the Daily 4, as people already play them all the time. All the lower gtd events run in the 40-70 player level so you would have a more balanced points distribution as they all draw the same amount of runners.  

[KenTouchMe]

Another fine promotion , i also try to play all the tournaments and if possible i'm all for color coding too , a mark , something would be great .

[FeelsBadMan]

 Same here, haven't received any promotional e-mail from Unibet in months, but in my case there was a weird bug with e-mail where I had to change my account e-mail address, but I would still get promotional stuff only on the old e-mail address for months (as well as daily notifications that I have funds in my account and I need to play to not get inactivity penalties, even though I was playing every day, because it was basing it off the old e-mail address rather then the new one). So I ended up requesting to stop getting e-mails on that old e-mail address (to stop getting the daily spam) and I didn't get any promo mails since, on any e-mail address. I'm guessing the mail list you guys use for promotions doesn't update properly with the e-mails from the accounts, maybe it's an efficiency thing where if an account already had its e-mail address added to the mailing list then it won't be checked for a long time I guess, same thing might happen with regional restrictions or regional only mailing lists. Dunno, just making some guesses on what might be happening, I don't particularly care about the promo mails since you and your team always keep us updated on the community but alot of players seem to be experiencing this.

 

 Yeah, that's exactly what I mean, without the big ones, the points awarded are far more consistent. Buuut I alse loooovee how big and juicy the big tournaments get when there's a promo like this going on :lovekiss: . Another way to make points a bit more consistent would be to tweak the formula by adding a .x multiplier to the entrants variable, but ultimately the entire formula kinda needs to be redesigned since it limits them to what they can do, like for example adding a big final tournament to the league or some weird one-off tournaments which would really mess up the leaderboard with the current format. You probably also have a point about driving traffic to the smaller tournaments, I guess they keep track of the impact on them and will decide if it's #worth or not based on that.

[ChapInAChair]

Just following up on this for feedback purposes.

I've now had a 1st, three 2nds, a 3rd, a 4th and a 6th at the medium level games plus about a 75% top half finish rate and I'm only just squeaking into the top ten. I'm not complaining as the formula is very clear so I'm happy that it's completely fair but the calculation seems so far skewed towards the winners - and winners only - of the biggest field tournaments (who get big payouts anyway) that it might be worth a rethink if this promo runs again.

[Robin-Unibet]

A delayed reply from me because I have some excuses: D - been out of office a lot and a lot on my plate lately. Also had to re-think things regarding the comments.

Thanks a lot for the feedback and thoughts and effort though, really apprieciate it :)

Amount of games and type of games

We’ve run a similar league in the past with less events and less types of games per group. It happened that we had a player winning both leader boards and others finishing very high in both. Also these players were already the big winners of the tournaments. The selected games suited this particular player type very well and was lacking for all other type of players that we have. Therefore, we’ve chosen for more games and types per group and we believe if top 30 games count towards the final leader board score there is a shot for anyone to finish on decent spots.

We used our bigger games for this series, because we believe that increasing the bigger GTD tournaments during a promotion is worth more from a marketing perspective than increasing the lowest GTDs. We also don’t want to drive traffic away from our bigger GTD tournaments. Note that the bigger tournaments, because of peak times are more accessible and visible to the whole player base. Lastly bigger player pools, make it harder to win multiple games, which is beneficial for the casual player and leader board calculation fairness (1st place thing you pointed out with the spreadsheet)

Highlight tournaments in the client

This is a really good idea and was missed by us, because we are using existing tournaments and didn’t create new/ special tournaments for the leagues. I will add “(MTT Leagues)” behind the games showing from tomorrow on.

I will see whether it is possible to have something built in the new poker client, to highlight special events.

Leader board points distribution

Let me first say that we have been sitting together to come up with one very good leaderboard calculation, that we likely will use for all our MTT promotions in future times and we’d like to have it integrated on site for you guys to easily calculate your leaderboard points. Because of the new poker client coming up this has been moved to somewhere on the PRIO list after the new client has been launched. However, I can explain why the leaderboard calculation is as it is and a new version will likely be very close to this one either way.

In general, leader board formulas for online MTTs are often giving a lot more points to the number one, as it is not that likely that players finish 1st too often when the player pools are big. So finishing 1st is valued a lot.

About the hypothetical comparison of the two extreme player’s results. One winning 7 events, but not finishing top 50% in any other events during the month. One making 30 final tables and never winning any tournament at the other side.  I think that is just a very unrealistic happening. Who is winning 7 big events than suddenly not getting anywhere close or who is always making final table and never winning? If it ever happens just it happens too rarely to even be highlighted.

As said 1st in bigger tournaments is always valued much more than 2nd and for the leader boards we want to have some variance in the outcome so that we not only reward the players with the biggest ROI in the tournaments.

Ok back to the grind and bink some tourneys glgl!

[MoreTBC]

I agree a varied game selection is good for the league. I was off the mark about lowering the number of tournaments I'll admit, you want to give players plenty of chances to win. 

"We used our bigger games for this series, because we believe that increasing the bigger GTD tournaments during a promotion is worth more from a marketing perspective than increasing the lowest GTDs. We also don’t want to drive traffic away from our bigger GTD tournaments."

I could understand this is there was any marketing that said the GTDs were going to increase during the league but I've not seen any. Ignoring the fact the mailshot didn't reach a number of people, there is nothing on the website to suggest that GTD would be going up during the league. I'll be honest, I don't look at the GTDs so the only one I remember is the Daily 4 which is €600. This hasn't changed as far as I'm aware (although maybe the prize pool has increased this month). Now that I've won it twice (sick brag 🆒) I know that on a Monday in September there were 127 entrants and on Thursday there was 130. The win was worth €20 more in November, which suggests people are firing extra bullets, but other than that it doesn't appear to be doing anything in regards to player numbers or prizepools. Obviously this is a tiny sample so it may be a one off.

Hopefully things will improve now that the tourneys are highlighted, thank you for adding it. I hope some sort of colour coding/icons in the lobby will happen in 2.0 to make things easier to read. It doesn't need to be PS level rainbow but separation between Sats, majors and regular events would be good.

I agree, my example regarding the points formula was extreme but it does highlight a few things. Specifically in the low league it shows that the €1 and €2 events that qualify are kinda pointless to play. You can beat a €4 field 1/4 of the size of a €1 one and still get more points so why would you waste table space with them? I think a modified Butler league points system makes more sense for the league. Should finishing 1st over 2nd really be worth double the points if you've outlasted 200+ people? IMO no. I don't think a promotion where you are required to play regularly and in a decent volume is designed for a casual player so why make the formula fit that? At almost halfway the leader of the low league has 523 points,  the equivalent of 5 1st place finishes in 130+ player €4 events. A casual player cannot compete with that playing once or twice a week. It would be 320 points using the butler league system.

For medium and high leagues the formula includes buy-in as a variable but it isn't one. All the events are the same buy in so it's not required. I think if it wasn't there it would also level out the low league. I know we can argue if you pay more rake you deserve more points but why not make it a smaller multiplier to level the playing field slightly? 

We could probably go back and forth about the formula forever but I guess the point I'm trying to make is that a league is designed to show who is the best over a period of time and having a points formula that tries to promote a single win over consistency seem counter-intuitive. 

 

Slightly off topic but I thought it was mentioned there would be some more transparency regarding how players points totals were being made up. Extra stuff on the leaderboard like counted MTTS, 1sts etc.. was I dreaming or was that discussed?

[FeelsBadMan]

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@MoreTBC wrote:

I could understand this is there was any marketing that said the GTDs were going to increase during the league but I've not seen any. Ignoring the fact the mailshot didn't reach a number of people, there is nothing on the website to suggest that GTD would be going up during the league. I'll be honest, I don't look at the GTDs so the only one I remember is the Daily 4 which is €600. This hasn't changed as far as I'm aware (although maybe the prize pool has increased this month). Now that I've won it twice (sick brag 🆒) I know that on a Monday in September there were 127 entrants and on Thursday there was 130. The win was worth €20 more in November, which suggests people are firing extra bullets, but other than that it doesn't appear to be doing anything in regards to player numbers or prizepools. Obviously this is a tiny sample so it may be a one off.

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I think what he means is that attendance and prizepool would increase in the GTD tournaments as a result of running this league, not increasing the GTD itself. And from what I've seen the tournaments have been booming, the numbers differ from day to day but I've seen 300 gtds with 900+€ prizpool , 400 gtd with 800 prizepool, 1'st place in some tournaments jumping from 400 to 600€ etc. Don't know exactly what all the numbers were last month tho, also the impact on the 4€s might be smaller. 

[MoreTBC]

I've been having a think over the weekend about ways to try and level the playing field when it comes to a league structure because I'm weird like that :geek:

In order for 'anyone to win' the variance needs to be as high as possible. When you have up to 300 possibilities to score points, as in the current state, the good players are going to have the edge. My solution, make it impossible to play every qualifying tournament :wow:

The following ideas are based on the assumption that the software can do these things (I expect it can't just now) and in option 1, rake does not need to be generated to cover the prize pool (It's already budgeted for)

 

Option 1 

A single tournament is set up for each day of the month (30 days for maths ease) there is no buy in for it and no prize pool. It requires a ticket to enter. Each player is given 10 (number up for debate) tickets at the start of the month that allow them entry to any of the tournaments during the month. Players are then free to play any days they want (rec friendly) in an attempt to score points for the leader board.

Option 2

3 Tournaments are made for each day. The tournament has a €0+x buy in where x is three different levels to cover a low/mid/high system. x is generating a prize pool for the league which would be topped by Unibet (Because they're so generous ;)) When you log in you get a notification that you have x amount of league entries left (10 max). Players are then free to play any days they want (rec friendly) in an attempt to score points for the leader board.

 

There are some obvious issues with the above, the biggest one being how Unibet makes any money from the league. In option 2 you can at least take a % of the x value as rake. To help with this you could make it a 'depositors league' and only give tickets to players that deposit €50 or something onto the site and then just T&C that if you withdraw the money within the month you're removed from the league. You could only give tickets to players that have met a playing criteria in the last month and announce the league a month early to give players a chance to play extra to qualify. To be honest I have no idea about the financial side of things so I'm just guessing at that part :happy:

The other thing is that players may end up using all they're playing options in the first 10 days and the tournaments at the end of the month with have less players and thus less points up for grabs. You could set a player cap on the daily MTTs to try and control that but you risk rec players not making it in on the only days they can play. It would depend on being able to know exactly how many players were elegible to play in the league and balance the cap out out accordingly I suppose.

The premise behind both options is to maximise variance and offer the rec players the greatest chance to go on a heater/get lucky and compete with the MTT regs.

Just a brain fart.. :)

 

[MoreTBC]

I've gone back to the formula math and I have an alternative to consider :)

SQRT((entrants * Buy in * 50)/finishing place)

It's a stolen formula, I'll be honest :) I did tweak it a little to try and make sure 1st still had a decent points advantage over 2nd but you can play about with the multiple and adding a + x to the finishing place to change the gaps. How would it look in a real world example I hear you ask...

 

 

The same results in the existing formula :-

Player A still wins in both examples, just not by nearly as much using the first formula. Obviously with the way I've created the formula you get a lot more points in general but you get the idea of how it balances out and if you lower the multipler things probably get even tighter. Player A is in theory the casual player that makes some really great runs as well as some min scoring results. Player B is your regular solid MTT player who's consistently beating the majority of the field but never making the top spot.

I have now noticed in those examples I've given them the same finishing places in the same fields a couple of times, +/- 20 points either way :Geek:

 

Anyway, some more food for thought. 

[rulkisa]

why mtt league still running?

[rulkisa]

i will get the points or not if i play or its just a bug?

[FeelsBadMan]

You don't get points, it's just the tournament names that were changed for the league and now need to be changed back 

[Robin-Unibet]

As  correctly said, the tournament names had to be changed back.

Sorry for the inconvenience, changed names back of all upcoming ones.

Thanks guys!