Rebuy, cash, and BBT

For some reason I can't quite fathom, I played in a cheap rebuy tournament last night. I used to hate these things. The crazy play in the rebuy period would drive me nuts. I'd spent so much time keeping my inner donkey in check I just couldn't embrace the idea of letting him out, if only for a little while.

Now I've learned to successfully thread my way through the donkey period, well, most of the time, and get to the point where play becomes a bit more normal. I wouldn't say I've gotten to where I love rebuys, but I don't hate them anymore.

Rebuys do generally exhibit some characteristics that can give great advantage to a knowledgeable, careful player. There are usually LOTS of donkeys playing these things, particularly the cheap ones. This presents many opportunities to greatly increase your stack during the rebuy period.

I've been loosening up my play a lot during this time. Not to the point of being totally nuts, but I'll play any two tightly connected cards, pretty much any suited connectors, any big cards, any suited ace, assuming I can get in cheap. I'll be generous when calculating implied odds to justify making what would otherwise look like a donkey call. I called one inside straight draw last night because I knew if I hit it I'd get the other guy's stack. I did.

A side effect of the looser play during the rebuy period is that a larger percentage of donkeys will make it through the first hour with very large stacks. This provides a second chance at taking away huge stacks for the cunning player.

These cheap rebuys also seem to simply attract a lot more donkeys. Idiotic play can be seen well past the bubble. I suppose this alone does not distinguish rebuys from regular tournaments, but it does seem to be observed with greater frequency in the rebuys.

Last night I played a $3 rebuy with a $6,000 guaranteed prize pool. I don't know if it was just an off night or what, but Full Tilt definitely lost money on this one. Even with the rebuys and add-ons, we fell considerably short of $6,000.

My first table seemed to be populated by people who'd never played a rebuy. Hell, I think most of these people hadn't even played much NL. One other player and I were the only ones to take an initial rebuy. Play was not the loosey-goosey stuff you normally see. I don't think I've ever seen so many min-bets and min-raises in one tournament before. They appeared to all be escapees from limit.

I had a few hands where I made good reads and was able to capitalize. At one point I think I made it to about 20th on the leaderboard. My first big hit was when somebody slowplayed pocket rockets, caught his set on the flop, and I had the misfortune of turning two pair. He played it well enough that I actually pushed him all-in.

By this time the disparity between big stacks and small stacks had grown quite large, and some of the big stacks were taking advantage. This made it tough to do much without cards, and those had pretty much dried up. I went out just before the second money increase. $2.70 profit for my three hours.

When that was over I decided to go play in the shallow end of the NL pool. If not for one hand where I got suckered by a too-big river bet I would have done a lot better. As it was I still walked away up 20BB in less than an hour. Not too shabby. Certainly a better per-hour rate than the rebuy.

Finally, the BBT. There has been a lot of discussion on various blogs about the points system and how extending the points all the way to the 50% mark resulted in people playing unusually tight, some even folding their way into the points. There are a number of issues here and some of the arguments don't seem to hold a lot of water.

Hoyazo in particular has been critical of the system and what he believes are resultant changes in the way some people would ordinarily play. I find this argument more than a bit confusing. Earlier this week he mentioned in his blog that one of the points of the blogger tournaments was for bloggers to have a place to hang out together, blow off steam, and feel free to play like the donkeys they so hate to suffer suckouts from in "regular" play. (Thanks, BTW, for making my good read of your too-large river bet sound as though I was some calling station who benefited from your sudden urge to act like a donkey just because you could.)

So, this raises a question. Is the "regular" style of play hoy is used to seeing in these blogaments the bloggers' "A game", or is it a donkefied version they save for these events to blow off steam? If hoy's contention that bloggers are donkefying their play for the blogaments is true, then perhaps what he was witnessing in the BBT was the real "A game" because they'd suddenly started taking these tournaments seriously. This would mean the only real change was that people were being serious about acquiring points. That would seem to be the objective of the BBT, so it should come as no surprise.

I would agree that there were changes in play style due to the artificial, second bubble created by the points at the 50% mark. Again, this is to be expected if people are taking the points seriously. It's no different than the money bubble. If you want a tournament with no bubble play, then you need to make it winner-take-all.

Hoy is suggesting the points be moved to the 20% mark rather than the 50% mark. I don't believe this does anything to fix the "problem", it simply moves the goal line. Instead of two bubbles separated fairly widely, there will be two bubbles fairly close together.

I believe Jordan came far closer to the truth of the matter. The points are there to encourage long term participation. By making it harder to get to the points, you are going to discourage those who don't score big points early in the blogament series.

My suggestion on the points embraces Jordan's concept and goes in the opposite direction of most other suggestions. I say change the formula so everyone gets points just for participating. To make it so simply showing up and giving a mediocre performance week after week won't get you to the top of the leaderboard, some changes to the formula will be necessary.

This season the BBT used the PokerStars TLB formula, modified to give points down to the 50% points for each tournament. The formula is:

Points = 10 * [sqrt(n)/sqrt(k)] * [1+log(b+0.25)]

Where:

n is the number of entrants
k is the place of finish (k=1 for the first-place finisher, and so on)
b is the buy-in amount in dollars (excluding administrative fee).

My suggestion is to further multiply this amount by some factor representing the amount of money won in the tournament. I'm no math whiz so maybe somebody has a better suggestion, but my first shot would be to multiply by sqrt(1+m), where m is the number of dollars won. The new formula would be:


Points = 10 * [sqrt(n)/sqrt(k)] * [1+log(b+0.25)] * sqrt(1+m)

Where:

n is the number of entrants
k is the place of finish (k=1 for the first-place finisher, and so on)
b is the buy-in amount in dollars (excluding administrative fee)
m is the amount won in dollars.

This gives everyone points so they can look at the leaderboard and see something other than a blank next to their name. It encourages a sense of participation. This formula also results in a single bubble where the money begins. Those who win big money get big points, those who consistently finish near the bottom still get to be less embarrassed when they look at the leaderboard.

As always, your comments are welcome.