Aside from his outstanding poker play and myriad of poker tournament achievements (as if those weren’t enough), Daniel Negreanu is perhaps best known for his willingness to speak his mind. Lucky for us, he has a poker blog on his site, FullContactPoker.com. This week, he chimed in on an issue that has been getting more attention of late: multi-entry tournaments.
Multi-entry tournaments are fairly self-explanatory. They are tourneys (we’re talking the live variety in this case) in which players can pay another buy-in to try again should they bust out. Some are essentially structured just like a re-buy tournament in that players can re-enter as many times as they want within the registration period. Others, and these are more common, allow players to re-enter on a different starting day if they bust out. So if someone is eliminated on Day 1A of a tournament with more than one starting flight, they have to sit out the rest of that day, but can buy-in again on Day 1B or Day 1C or what-have-you.
Negreanu first explains what goes into the decision to make a tournament a multi-entry event. For the venue, he says, it is simply a money decision. If they believe they can grab more entry fees by allowing for multiple entries, then they may very well make the decision to host a multi-entry tournament. The event organizer (Negreanu uses the World Poker Tour as an example) really has nothing to do with the decision.
He goes on to state that he understands why players don’t usually like multi-entry tournaments. “….a lot of players express concern that unlimited re-entry tournaments are bad for the game, discourages amateur players, and bleeds player bankroll. A case can be made for all three of those things being true,” he says. In fact, he says that he himself, despite being the biggest live tournament money winner of all time, does not like re-entry events.
He adds, though, that a case for re-entry tournaments is that they give players more opportunities to play, which can be especially important for those who travel from far away. It is really disheartening to pony up a few thousand dollars, get bounced early, and then have to turn around and go home. Re-entry events, though they of course cost the player more money, at least give more chances to play some poker.
So what to do, what to do? Negreanu believes that re-entry tournaments can be eliminated while at the same time allowing venues to keep making money by following the European Poker Tour’s model. As he explains, “They create a festival AFTER the main event begins. For ages, tournaments in the US would run two to four weeks of prelims, then have a week long main event. Bust the main event, and there is nothing left to play.”
He adds, “If you have postlims, people don’t need to extend their trips past what they already expected to fly in for to play the main event. By offering guys like Joe Hachem, who travels 24 hours to play a tournament in the US, more than just one opportunity to play a tournament, it’s a much more enticing proposition for him to fly over.”
Negreanu also explains that while he does not like multi-entry tournaments, he still takes full advantage of their structure when he plays in them. After all, he has the money, so it would be stupid not to do so.
