With the inaugural SCOOP having concluded (along with my first ever $10K buyin cash!), I have a few suggestions that I feel might help improve the series in the future alongside potentially benefiting the WCOOP as well.

1.  Must-Play Satellites. Especially in this economy, any low stakes grinder/player who wins his way from his $2 satellite up to a $10K buyin or whatever is CLEARLY most likely going to unregister and take the $10K in W$.  Considering that W$ is selling at 98%+ these days it seems like only the degens will actually play the seat, especially with big-prize options also there for them to play but for 1/10th or 1/100th the buyins.  Considering that Pokerstars forces people to play their first seats when they win live tournament packages (except WSOP I think, but definitely EPT), I don’t see what problem stars could have against doing this for their online events.  I’m not sure if they still do it, but I remember in the past Pokerstars staff was unwilling to provide assistance in chopping a satellite and cited “we want to create seats for the event” as the reasoning.  If your goal is to get people into the tournaments, why are you allowing them to unregister?  Alternatively, I think FTP has a great idea in their “zero to hero” type of challenges for FTOPS if you for some reason feel unregistration is something that can’t go.

2.  Structure Modifications. Although I think Pokerstars put together a great 6m and 9m NLHE tournament series, I think there are definitely things that could be adjusted in the rest of the schedule.  Although I’m not a great PLO player and didn’t play a bunch of the plo’s, I don’t understand how in a $5K 6m PLO you could start the tournament with only 100bb.  Although I think the late structure was pretty good – and I agree totally with Matt Savage in that starting stacks are typically meaningless and usually just a hook for the masses – the DEPTH of starting stacks in terms of BB’s does matter somewhat, especially in PLO.  Nobody is looking for a crapshoot in a $5K tournament and I think doubling stacks to $10k and leaving the levels at 25-50, 30-60, 40-80, 50-100 etc is fine.  Both the PLO and NLHE 2k 1r1a’s also started a bit too shallow as well.

The $25K HU structure was pathetic and you’ve been lambasted strongly enough for that already by 2+2.  Any $25K tournament that lasts 5 hours has to be a joke, and if you needed more proof of that you can look at the fact that John Duthie, while a cool person, is hardly a HU HSNL genius and almost won.  Some of the best hu NL players around – Durrr, Phil Galfond, etc – didn’t play in the event at least partially because it was nothing but a glorified set of SNGs.  Double starting stacks and you’re good to go.

3.  Entrant Caps. I don’t really think this is a huge complaint, but capping the $1500 10m shootout at 100 people was sort of silly.  I’d think you could easily field 1000 players for it, but if you’re really worried, make it a triple shootout and reduce the number of players per table to 8 or 9 handed.  You could also do as FTP does and just let the discrepancy carry onto the next level (IE, if I win a 9 handed shootout that starts w/ 2000 chips I start rd 2 with $18K, however if my table is 8 handed I only have $16K).  I don’t see any problem with this or argument against it (besides “the software doesn’t allow it”).  Not allowing byes in the $2500 HU is kind of silly too, although can see why you’d do it in the $25K.  Byes are totally fair and most HU players probably know this – and those who don’t can have it explained to them when they register in the pop up window.  Not allowing people to play these events costs stars money for no real reason.

4.  Satellites. Due to how late this series was deployed it was understandably tough to drum up huge fields.  Regardless, I think stars did a pretty good job gathering large fields anyway mostly by using attractive guarantees – however I felt satellites really only picked up towards the end mostly due to the 2+2 thread begging for satellites that had guaranteed seats.  Do bigger seat guarantees, and earlier, next time.  Also, perhaps it’s just me, but I’m a pretty huge degen and find little appeal in playing a $500r hyper turbo satellite.  Make it a gntd seat $1K hyper turbo, $1500 turbo, $1000 regular, DSOs, whatever, but that R at the end of $500 scares people away and you end up just getting the top-level satellite players battling it out to see who gets $10K in W$.  That big $2K satellite at 6PM sundays for a month or two never got near its potential either – I think this was mostly due to the seat guarantee being tiny or nonexistent.  The tournament could have really used a big shiny red 10+ seat gnte on it (and a drop to $1K or something more satellitable/shot-takeable).

5. Modify buyin tiers on some of the events. I’m kind of torn on this one, and this is the only set of suggestions I’ve been mostly told to make by other people, as I spent a little bit of time asking for other opinions before writing this.  Some people have said to me that by having a medium event, you made people ‘content’ to just play that and not try to sat into the high variant (but I’m not sure this is true, again due to the guarantees).  I’ve heard the suggestion that you could have made the $25K a standalone event, but don’t really see how this benefits pokerstars or the players at all.  I do think if you had just a $10K main event with no 1k or 100 that you would have ended up with a greater 10k field but I don’t think it would have been substantial (probably under 100 more).  I’d like to hear more arguments on this by people, though, but I don’t think I endorse anything in this point.  Is WCOOP planning to do a tier-buyin system?  I do think a two-tier system (1/100th and the standard) would work very well for that sort of tournament.

6.  Standardize late registration. Pretty basic one – some events were open for the first hour, some weren’t.  I got home within the first hour of the $4K 8game and it was closed while all nlhe’s were open for the full hour.  I don’t mind it being open as long as it was, just make it consistent.

7.  Time banks. After the disaster of having no time banks at huge final tables during WCOOP, a decent adjustment was made in giving people plenty of timebank for the duration of the tournament – however, having an 8 minute timebank to be used whenever is just a little silly.  I’m not sure how to deal with it (other than DEFINITELY curbing it in the limit games/turbos) – maybe give people 300 seconds at start then reset all timebanks to 300 seconds once ITM and at the final table do the same once more.  You could leave it as is if you somehow published and policed a strong anti-stalling policy that would end those terrible stalling behaviors – but as is, it just was terribly annoying and slowed down the game a lot at several points and needs to be fixed.

8.  Payouts. I don’t really have much to say, actually, I thought payouts were pretty good, although you should probably have in some cases paid out a few less places and distributed more money to the top 3 finishers.  I thought it was kind of interesting that the slightly smaller Bay101 10K had top three payouts of $1M, $500k, $290K and in the 10K SCOOP they were $900k, $700k, $500k.  The mincash at Bay101 was $12.5k and the mincash in SCOOP was $25K.  I actually think for a 10k the payout structure worked pretty well, but I could definitely see paying less people / more to top 3 in some of the smaller events.  If you added a “fluid” pay table to the lobby – letting you advertise the projected prizes of the tournament, i.e., if the prize pool is at $5M then the 501st person joins and the posted payouts all update (even before the start of the tournament) – you might lure some of the people on the fence with the big first place prizes.

That’s all I could think of after mulling it over for awhile.  I can’t commit on the limit structures as I only played the HORSE $1K but it seemed fine to me.

As I said earlier, stars did some things really well – listening to the ongoing feedback in the 2+2 thread, putting together some of the best structured 9 handed NL tournaments I’ve ever played, and somehow getting as many people as they did into all these tournaments on such short notice.  Very well done overall, and a special thanks to Bryan who did a pretty damn good job as ambassador/feedbackseeker/scapegoat for the poker community.

I’ll post stars’ response to this once I get it, assuming they give me permission to do so.  It’s been awhile, but an overdue tuesday taknapotin television treatise will definitely incoming later tonight.