Poker Forum

Paying 15-20% of the field sounds like a happy medium. The goals:
-keep poker amateurs coming back.
-keep low-bank-roll pros and wannabes in the game.
Why is poker profitable? Where does our edge come from? Exactly. If the field has fewer 'fish', the luck factor increases, and pros edge on going broke.
I'm sure we can get a calculator and figure out how to keep the final table payouts at their premium while flattening out the rest of the payouts just a little, not a significant amount. Even paying 13% or 17% of the field can be decent...doesn't have to be numbers like 10/15/20/25%.
Lets give this a shot.

This one is winded, but informative...

Lets take a live example of paying the top 20% of the 2010 WSOP Main Event instead of 10%.

I did the math in this example where you would pay the second 10% of players (747 more players) 50% of their buy-in ($5000). This would require ~5% (5.4289% to be exact) of the total prize purse of $68,799,059.
This would mean each player's prize is decreased by ~5%.
At a 5.4289% decrease, the top 3 payouts would change as follows:

From:
8,944,310
5,545,955
4,130,049

To:
8,458,723
5,244,865
3,905,828

A would-be min cash for the top 10% of the field changes:

From:
19263

To:
18217

Now this is worst case scenario of paying out to 20% of the field. Make it 15 or 17% of the field, and everyone keeps a little more.

I'd prefer to lock in 5k of my 10k buy in, specially if I satellited in for 1k or 2k, I'm still showing a profit. If I get coolered during the bottom 10% of the 20% paid and get 5k, at least I'm not out $10k.

You can go further with this and just pay the bottom 747 players $4k instead of $5k. Why? That frees up $747k. That can be distributed to places 1,2,3 if we really must keep those places paid more.

Point is, there's intelligent ways to do this while preserving the BIG money of the final table.

Lets keep the poker economy strong!

Hope we can improve the fields next year!

-NLS

i run private tournaments in mexico and i pay 20%. this keeps more players coming back and increases teh size of the field. if pros dont like the 25% structure, no one is forcing them to play it. where else in vegas can you put down 25k and get 900k back and not have the odds stacked against you?

agree with nolimit....why are those pros complaining if the weaker players will be less intimidated to enter these big buy in events hence making the field softer and larger which could possibly increase the overall first place?