Very shortly, you’ll be seeing the first phase of a new tournament schedule at Cake Poker. We’re very excited about it and we think that once you see it, you will be too.
Online poker sites are coming out with new tournament schedules on a regular basis and it’s reasonable for you to ask, “So, what’s the big deal?” Furthermore, this Guest Column I’m writing is supposed to be editorial space, not marketing information. So, I need to go a bit beyond “Hey, our new tournament schedule is coming out.”
I thought it would be interesting to give you some of our rationale behind the new schedule. This is the first major overhaul of Cake’s tournament offering since the site was formed and we wanted to make major improvements. One of the best things we did was bring in two ultra-bright tournament players to add their input to the process. Specifically, Serge “adanthar” Ravitch and Eric “rizen” Lynch sat with us and gave their perspectives as multi-table tournament (MTT) professionals. Here are some of the cornerstones of the plan that came out of those meetings:
1. Longer late-registration is good. There are lots of reasons for this, but the bottom line is that more people entering a tournament is almost always a good thing. As long as you don’t interfere with the integrity of the tournament, then just about everybody benefits. Moreover, we are careful to make sure that nobody can register for the tournament at a point where they’d have a noticeable edge by coming in late. There’s another reason for late registration: a lot of mid-limit tournament grinders are famously forgetful (at this point, adanthar sheepishly raised his hand). This helps those of you who occasionally forget to register for a tournament that you’d been for waiting all day.
2. Freezeouts are generally better than rebuys. Up until now, much of the Cake Poker tournament schedule has been built around rebuy and add-on (R&A) tournaments. This was based on informal input from many of our network partners. But, when all of us sat down and looked critically at the subject, we were quickly persuaded that freezeouts should represent a majority of our tournaments.
a. Players generally prefer rebuys. When you sit down in a freezeout tournament, you know exactly what your investment is going to be – you’re not trying to out-buy deep-pocketed opponents.
b. R&A tournaments are actually worse for weaker players. This isn’t necessarily intuitive, because many players say, “I’m just going to buy in once and not rebuy. That way, I’m benefitting from all of the rebuys and getting an overlay.” Well, the math simply doesn’t support this argument. Let’s take two players: BassyBob and TiburonTwo. Bob chooses to buy in once and won’t rebuy. Tiburon is prepared to rebuy whenever necessary.
There’s a catch: Bob is not as strong a player as Tiburon. On average, when they get all of the money in against each other, Tiburon is a 55:45 favorite. So, they get all-in once, and 55% of the time, BassyBob is gone from the tournament. Suppose his 45% bet comes in and he doubles up. Well, Tiburon rebuys and waits for another shot at Bob. When they mix it up again, Bob is still a 45:55 underdog. In short, BassyBob must continually parlay his come-from-behind wins to stay in, while Tiburon has the advantage of playing better and the ability to come back, phoenix-like, after BassyBob “busts” him.
The results speak for themselves. When we analyzed R&A tournaments on Cake, the players who didn’t rebuy had virtually no chance to cash. Their original buy-ins are pretty much a gift to the prize pool. This is obviously bad for weaker players and the site in general.
In short, we felt that freezeouts were clearly preferable to R&A MTTs. Our new schedule will reflect this as we roll it out over the coming months.
3. Drafting is good for everybody. The term “drafting” comes from bicycle racing (and now NASCAR). It’s the practice of one racer tucking himself in directly behind an opponent and letting the opponent use extra energy (muscles, gas, etc.) to push the wind aside for both. Suppose you like playing $50 MTTs and Cake Poker has a 7:00pm $50 tournament, but two of our competitors have theirs at 8:30pm and 10:00pm, respectively. That’s kind of a hassle if you want to play all three. After all, you might want to eat dinner, hang out with your girlfriend, or go to the gym somewhere in there. So we said, “Let’s find the most popular $50 tournament on the internet and park our $50 event right behind it.” Now, you can play our tournament along with our competitor’s event and still have time to do your reps on the elliptical machine.
Rather than just vague promises, here are a couple of specifics:
· A nightly $50+5 turbo freezeout at 8:00pm ET with a $6,000 guarantee
· A nightly $150+12 freezeout at 9:00pm ET with a $20,000 guarantee
There’s much more, but you’ll have to wait a few days to see it. And we definitely have more ideas up our sleeves; you’ll be seeing the fruits of those over the coming months. But here’s the bottom line: we now have a bunch of poker geeks planning the tournaments – we want the same things in MTTs that you do. Keep your eyes open – the next weeks and months are going to be very exciting for tournament players at Cake Poker.
Lee Jones is the Card Room Manager of Cake Poker. He has worked in the poker industry for over six years and been associated with professional poker for almost 20 years. He is the author of “Winning Low Limit Hold’em,” which has been in print for almost 15 years.
