Project Mayhem - Season 05

"Fight Club was the beginning, now it's moved out of the basement, it's called Project Mayhem."

— Tyler Durden

Here's the snapshot of the Project Mayhem page after the Season 5 Final Tournament had run.

Okay, I only picked that quote because it's kinda-sorta related to the name of this site. But honestly, everything here on this page is going to keep taking place in our basement.

Our Project Mayhem is something Shannon has wanted for a long time: an honest-to-goodness poker league. I've sort of accomplished a league by breaking our weekend games into Seasons and keeping track of stats for how folks do each season, but that's a pretty half-assed league.

Instead our new idea is that for Season V (beginning in January 2012, and running for a total of eight weekend nights) we'll have folks voluntarily buy into Project Mayhem to the tune of an extra $3 per tournament. All that money will be set aside each night, and after all the regular season tournaments are run, we will have one final deep-stacked tournament with all the Project Mayhem members playing. In the process, we should build up quite the kitty and generate a fairly-big prize pool.

Folks who didn't want to be part of Project Mayhem wouldn't pay the extra $3 per tournament, and wouldn't at all be affected by things (other than they wouldn't be able to play in that final tournament for all the money).

To be completely on the up-and-up, I have to admit to a second goal: we'd really like to get a more regular group of attendees for our games as it's not a lot of fun to stress out whether or not we've got enough butts in seats to get a good game together. If Project Mayhem turns out to provide extra incentive for folks to show up on a long-term basis, then that's a huge win for your humble host and hostess.

Eligibility

There's only room in the Final Table for ten players, so we can only accept ten folks as Project Mayhem members. The first ten folks to indicate that they are 100% in and/or buying into a Season V tournament will be our inaugural members. We will only run Project Mayhem events concurrent with our weekend (Saturday) games.

Obviously both Shannon and I will enter so we've got eight seats left. I'm also guessing she and I will both enter both tournaments for all eight weeks as Project Mayhem eligible, so right there our prize pool is up to $3 (PM eligibility per tournament) x 8 (weekend nights of poker) x 2 (PM-eligible tournaments per weekend night) x 2 (players: Shannon & Neal) = $96 starting prize pool.

PM-eligible tournaments happen on Saturday nights. There are two each Saturday night (the Quick Tournament and the evening's Main Event). Folks who are in Project Mayhem have the option to play as PM-eligible for each of these two tournaments. To be PM-eligible, you have to pay $3 at the time you're playing (and that money will go off into a separate envelope). What does this eligibility get for you? Two things: 1) you get one attendance point (which ultimately gets used to determine your starting chips in the final tournament, see below for more details), and 2) you earn Project Mayhem Points (PiMPs!) based on how well you perform in the tournament. PiMPs also get you some starting chips, and they also have one other specific use for the final table which will be explained below.

Even if you're part of PM, you can decide to not buy-in to a tournament as PM-eligible (and save $3 in the process). If that's the case, then it's just like you didn't show up for that particular tournament: you don't get an attendance point, nor would you earn any PiMPs. (For what it's worth, there's a bank across the street from our house that has a 24-hour ATM. And there's a liquor store over there as well. Just sayin'...)

If you read this page before Christmas of 2011, the original proposal was a bit different: folks earned PiMPs based on how well they did in the tournaments and these PiMPs were then used to determine your starting chip stack. Since one of the big goals of the tournament is to encourage more regular attendance out of folks, I thought it'd make more sense to make a direct link to our goal and your motivation. So this new system is that chips at the final table are based mostly on attendance with a little bit of a teaser based on performance.

Players

1. Neal

2. Shannon

3. David

4. Solveig

5. Julius

6. open

7. open

8. open

9. open

10. open

Points

As indicated above, you need to buy into a PM-eligible tournament (for $3) to earn attendance points and PiMPs. Even if you've already committed to being one of the ten Project Mayhem entrants, unless you pay at the time of entering the tournament, you're not earning either of these things. Money up front, 100% of the time.

Attendance Points and Starting Stacks

Attendance points are earned for each eligible tournament you enter (pay your $3). Each tournament is worth T250 chips to your starting stack at the final table. Additionally, if you hit the eight-tournament threshold, you get a bonus T500 chips, and the twelve-tournament threshold gets you another bonus T500 to your starting stack. A table of tournaments entered vs. starting chips at the final table, then, looks as follows:

2 Tournaments = T500 chips

4 Tournaments = T1000 chips

6 Tournaments = T1500 chips,

8 Tournaments = T2500 chips,

10 Tournaments = T3000 chips,

12 Tournaments = T4000 chips,

14 Tournaments = T4500 chips, and

16 Tournaments = T5000 chips.

Finally, before the final tournament starts, folks will have the option to buy additional starting chips at the cost of T250 chips per $4 spent. The maximum starting stack, however, is capped at T5000 chips (so if you already paid $48 over the course of 16 tournaments to start with T5000 chips, you can't spend any more to chip-up at the final table). Obviously this money all goes straight into the prize pool.

PiMPs

Things which earn you PiMPS:

1 PiMP.... Enter a Tournament (pay your $3)

1 PiMP.... Per player that finishes worse than you in a tournament (they do not have to be Project Mayhem-eligible players)

1 PiMP.... Per knockout you put on a fellow tournament player (not affected if they rebuy: does not have to be a permanent KO)

1 PiMP.... For finishing in the money (based on prize allotment on Structure page, chops or other prize agreements do not affect this point, nor does winning Bounty money during that particular tournament)

1 PiMP.... For finishing in first place

So what are PiMPs good for? Well mostly for bragging rights (and to give me another statistic to track — I loves me some stastical tracking!). But there are also two other benefits. One, for every 10 full PiMPs earned (no rounding: 19 PiMPs is just as good as 10), you get another T250 to your starting stack (capped at T5000), so even if you don't make all 16 tournaments, if you can make it to 12 or 14, chances are pretty good that you can get all T5000 in your starting stack. Secondly, seating at the final table tournament will be based on the order of PiMPs. Whomever finishes with the highest number of PiMPs will have their first option of seats at the table, with the option to defer if they so choose. Each time someone selects a seat at the table, we will scroll back up to the top of the PiMP list and allow the top remaining person their option of seats. Once you've picked a seat, there's no changing your mind.

Tiebreaks amoung PiMPs first go to the person with the fewest total tournament entries (if someone gets 47 PiMPs in six tournaments, then they beat out someone who got 47 PiMPs in eight tournaments). The next tiebreak would be to add 1 extra PiMP per category starting at the bottom of the above list (so starting with the number of first place finishes) to see if that makes a difference. If there's still a tie after that, then we'll high-card to break the tie.

I won't be calculating PiMPs for everyone on the fly (between tournaments), but will update a spreadsheet and post it here between Saturdays.

Final Tournament - Date set: 8 September 2012 at 2pm!

Congratulations to Dave for taking down first place in the first ever Project Mayhem Final Tournament! We will make some small tweaks to Project Mayhem moving forward, but it will remain a fixture for Season 6!

The Final Tournament would be run similarly to the Standard Tournament format with many more starting chips (we typically start a 10-handed Standard Tournament with T15,000 chips on the table; for this Final Tournament we could start with up to T50,000 chips). It'd be the only event for the evening. The rebuy rules have to be tweaked a bit, but for folks busting out the option to rebuy back in (up to the size of your starting stack, if you only started with T3000 through Attendance and PiMPs and an additional T1000 through paying $16 before the tournament started, you could only rebuy for T4000 total chips) would exist at a rate of $5 gets you T250 chips. The rebuy period would be extended through the end of the 16th level (instead of the 10th in a Standard Tournament). One rebuy per player only.

I'd like to run our Season V weekend tournaments every 3 or 4 weeks (2 week or 3 week gap between games) rather than once a month. If that's the case, then the PM final weekend lines up for sometime around week 26-week 29 of 2012, which corresponds to a range of 30 Jun - 21 Jul. We'd negotiate a weekend that works for PM participants well in advance of this time frame, though as hosts we'd have to reserve the right to yank the rug out from under everyone based on events in our lives. We have canceled as late as the day of the event in the past (though admittedly, those were pretty extreme circumstances — affected parties likely remember the reasonings...). From my heart I'd say that we'd do everything we could to hit the date we all agreed upon. But to eliminate any potential for misunderstandings: if you miss the date we play the final table (regardless of your fault or ours), you're not getting anything refunded (folks already are falling asleep at night dreaming about winning all that Big Money).

It's never too early to begin negotiating for a Final Table date. If Neal and Shannon aren't doing a good job with kicking off that conversation, please initiate it yourself. If everyone agrees, I'd send out PM-participant email addresses so that we could have our side conversation take place via email. (You may have noticed, but I'm pretty anal about not cross-pollinating email addresses so that folks don't have to worry about getting spam harvested or any other malodorous email activities.) I have posted a proposed list of dates below (and Shannon gave them a once-over to make sure they looked okay).

21250 starting chips in play across 5 players. Expectation is that the tournament will end when BB is 1/20th of all chips in play (i.e., 1063). This corresponds to level 20 (T450/900-200) or level 21 (T600/1200-300). With a desire for the tournament to last 300 minutes, that corresponds to 14 minute levels.

Goals

I see three goals:

• 1. Have a deep-stacked tournament for folks who are interested in playing for more than two hours.

  2. Have a tournament with a much bigger prize pool.

  3. Encourage folks to attend our regular weekend games more regularly.

The first two goals seem to go hand-in-hand. A big end-of-season blow-out tournament just sounds like pure fun. We'd ensure a group of folks that knew all our procedures and tendencies, which should make things go a bit faster. It'd kinda sorta act like a tournament of champions in that it'd be our biggest pay out each time around.

The last goal is a bit more selfish: it's no fun scrambling to make sure that we're going to get enough players to put together a full game, so whatever we can do to provide incentive for folks to show up more regularly makes it much easier on us.

Anyway, I'd love email feedback of folks interested in giving this a whirl. Are there eight more interested souls?

Potential Schedule (Season V & PMFT)

Just tossing this out there without a heckuva lot of thought. Will make things obvious when we're locked into dates.

1/14 Quick + Standard

2/4 Quick + Bounty

3/3 Quick + Standard

3/31 Quick + Cheap Rebuy

4/14 Quick + Standard

5/5 Quick + Add-on Extravaganza

6/2 Quick + Standard

6/30 Quick + Cheap Rebuy

8/4 Friendly

July? September?... Project Mayhem Final Tournament

[Added on 1/3/2012] A Comment on the Math

I just went through the Season IV numbers. The vast majority of players, had they earned their average PiMP points over the course of the season, would have hit the T5000 starting chip cap at between 9 and 12 tournaments (generally it would have happened at 11 tournaments), though the extra 500 chips a person earns at the 12th tournament just about guaranteed everyone that they'd have hit the cap (the average person gets about 6 1/3rd PiMPs per tournament, you'd have to get 3 or fewer to have not hit the cap on the 12th tournament - remember you get 1 PiMP just for buying in, and 1 for each person you finish ahead of or KO). That means that unless you're uber competitive for the PiMP title (and your first choice in seats!) you can count on missing two weekends worth of games and not be put at any sort of cost-to-entry or starting chip-stack disadvantage. It also means that it's pretty unlikely that we'll have $3 x 16 = $48 in entry money per person, as they'll have maxed out their starting chips a few tournaments ahead of that.

And if you don't think you can make it for five or six of the eight weekends, it only costs you an extra $2 per weekend you miss (in the average case) to make up for the chip differential. It does get significantly more expensive if you can only make 3 or fewer weekends of the eight total (the ballpark number of starting chips for someone playing 6 tournaments is T1500 from buy-ins, an additional T1000 through PiMPs, leaving T2500 to make up at $4/T250 — you'd have spent $3 x 6 + $40 = $58 in entry money compared to a more standard $3 x 11 = $33 in buy-in fees).

Results

Finances

We have completed Season V (as of 6/25/2012) and we have five Project Mayhem members (with a sixth mentioning an intent to buy in directly). Of the five of us we have a total of 58 entries. 58 x $3 is $174, and I have collected $174 in the envelope.

The last spreadsheet contains folks' starting chip stacks at the Final Tournament if it were to begin today (including a breakdown from Attendance Points and PiMPs), the pace folks are on for total attendances and PiMPs, and an approximation as to how many additional entries would be required to get the full T5000 starting stack based on current performance and AP pace.

By Week

25 June 2012 Season V, Episode 8, Quick Tournament

25 June 2012 Season V, Episode 8, Main Event (Cheap Rebuy Tournament)

(Solveig forwent her option to make this a PM-eligible tournament.)

2 June 2012 Season V, Episode 7, Quick Tournament

2 June 2012 Season V, Episode 7, Main Event (Standard Tournament)

(Solveig forwent her option to make this a PM-eligible tournament.)

5 May 2012 Season V, Episode 6, Quick Tournament

5 May 2012 Season V, Episode 6, Main Event (Add-On Extravaganza)

14 Apr 2012 Season V, Episode 5, Quick Tournament

31 Mar 2012 Season V, Episode 4, Main Event (Cheap Rebuy Tournament)

3 Mar 2012 Season V, Episode 3, Quick Tournament:

3 Mar 2012 Season V, Episode 3, Main Event (Standard Tournament):

4 Feb 2012 Season V, Episode 2, Quick Tournament:

4 Feb 2012 Season V, Episode 2, Main Event (KO Tournament):

14 Jan 2012 Season V, Episode 1, Quick Tournament:

14 Jan 2012 Season V, Episode 1, Main Event (Standard Tournament):