Project Mayhem - Season 06

The gist of Project Mayhem is that participating folks pay an extra $3 per tournament into the prize pool. How many Saturday night tournaments you enter (and to a much lesser-degree, how well you do during those tournaments) will dictate your starting chip stack at the final table. At the end of the season, all the PM participants set up a time and date for the Final Tournament, and we all play for the big money.

Eligibility

Currently there's only room at the Final Tournament for ten players, so we can only accept ten folks as Project Mayhem members. We may expand the game to a second poker table if we have enough demand, in which case we would expand the size of PM to accomodate. The first ten folks to physically buy into a Season VI tournament will be locked into Project Mayhem. We will only run Project Mayhem events concurrent with our weekend (Saturday) games.

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! — hmmm, maybe I should rename Attendance Points "Happening Occupations"...) 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.

Players for Season VI

1. Neal

2. Shannon

3. Dave

4. Julius

5. Phil

6. Shaun

7. Mike

8. Kirk

9. Ozzie

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 T200 chips to your starting stack at the final table. Additionally, if you hit certain attendance thresholds, you get T200 additional bonus chips (occurring at the 7, 9, 11, 13 and 15-tournament thresholds). A table of tournaments entered vs. starting chips at the final table, then, looks as follows:

2 Tournaments = T400 chips

4 Tournaments = T800 chips

6 Tournaments = T1200 chips,

8 Tournaments = T1800 chips,

10 Tournaments = T2400 chips,

12 Tournaments = T3000 chips,

14 Tournaments = T3600 chips,

16 Tournaments = T4200 chips,

18 Tournaments = T4600 chips, and

20 Tournaments = T5000 chips.

Finally, before the Final Tournament starts, folks will have the option to buy additional starting chips at the cost of T200 chips per $3 spent. The maximum starting stack, however, is capped at T5000 chips (so if you already paid $60 over the course of 20 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 15 full PiMPs earned (no rounding: 29 PiMPs is just as good as 15), you get another T200 to your starting stack (capped at T5000), so even if you don't make all 20 tournaments, if you can make it to 14 or 16, 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

Wrap-up after the Final Table on 8 June 2013: Congrats to Ozzie for his amazing come-back victory and taking down the top spot for his share of prize pool which approached $1000! Dave was a worthy heads-up adversary, but after Oz chewed through third-place finisher Shannon the chip differential was a bit too much.

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. Rebuy rules are tweaked a bit: folks busting out have 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 $15 before the tournament started, you could only rebuy for T4000 total chips) would exist at a rate of $4 gets you T250 chips. The rebuy period is extended through the end of the 16th level (instead of the 10th in a Standard Tournament). One rebuy per player only.

We intend to run weekend tournaments every 3 or 4 weeks (2 week or 3 week gap between games), so the expectation is that the Final Tournament would occur roughly 33-44 weeks after S6E01. 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).

Goals

I see three goals:

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

Have a tournament with a much bigger prize pool.

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 VI & PMFT)

September 22, 2012 Faster, Standard: Pam won the Quick Tournament, and Shannon won the Standard Tournament

October 20, 2012 Quick, Ante-Only: JasonD won the Quick Tournament, and Pam won the Ante-Only Tournament

November 3, 2012 Quick, Standard: Grant won the Quick Tournament, and Shannon won the Standard Tournament

December 8, 2012 Quick, Knockout: Neal won the Quick Tournament, and Neal won the Knockout Tournament

January 26, 2013 Quick, Standard: Grant won the Quick Tournament, and Neal won the Standard Tournament

February 9, 2013 Quick, Cheap Rebuy; A.J. won the Quick Tournament, and A.J. won the Cheap Rebuy Tournament

March 2, 2013 Quick, Standard; Grant won the Quick Tournament, and Tory won the Standard Tournament

March 23, 2013 Quick, Add-On Extravaganza; Neal won the Quick Tournament, and Adam B won the Add-on Extravaganza

April 27, 2013 Quick, Standard; Julius won the Quick Tournament, and Neal won the Standard Tournament

May 11, 2013 Quick, Cheap Rebuy; Shannon won the Quick Tournament, and Neal won the Cheap Rebuy Tournament

June 8, 2013 Project Mayhem Final Tournament; Ozzie won the Season 6 Project Mayhem title

Comments based on Season 5's Project Mayhem

Season five saw five participants average 6.5 PiMPs per entry. At that rate, the average player could expect to earn an extra T200 chips to their starting stack at entry numbers 3, 5, 7, 10, 12, 14, 17, and 19. Given the bonus chips offered up at entry number 7, 9, 11, 13, and 15 those two facts combine to make it very likely that the average player would pay a total of $45 for 15 entries to end up with the starting stack maximum of T5000 chips.

Shannon and I were in a dogfight down the final stretch of Season 5 to get as many PiMPs as possible for our first choice in seats at the final table. We contributed approximately $30 extra to the prize pool as compared to us not being in this internal competition with each other. Dave came into the final table with enough Attendance Points and PiMPs to earn T4250 chips (Season 5's PM had increments in T250 chunks), so he spent an additional $12 to top off. That was a good decision on his part, as he ended up taking the whole tournament (for a $131 payday).

Based on the change in season duration (20 vs. 16 tournaments) and some other factors, I've changed the rate at which Final Tournament chips accumulate. For Season 5, the average player would have had to buy into 12 tournaments ($36) to end up with a full stack. Based on the scheduled rate above, and assuming the 6.5 PiMPs/entry holds (a bit more on that below), the average player would have to buy into 14 or 15 tournaments to end up with a full stack ($42-45).

However, the 6.5 PiMPs/tournament is likely a low estimate. One of the big factors for how many PiMPs are available in any given tournament is the number of folks who show up to play: more players attending mean more opportunity for PiMPs to get handed out (more knockouts, and more folks to finish ahead of in the final standings). If, as expected, we end up purchasing a second table for our basement games, one would expect to see the average number of entrants to grow. And with a growth in entrants, there should be a corresponding increase in PiMPs/entry, and that should mean more "free" chips available at the final table.

Also, if you're in a position like Dave, where you want to purchase chips to top off at the final table, the rate from Season 5 was T250 chips per $4 (T62.5 chips per dollar). This rate has been adjusted to T200 chips per $3 (T66.7 chips per dollar), which is just a hair cheaper.

Finally, I shifted the ratio of expected Final Tournament starting chips from Attendance Points to PiMPs to slant slightly more heavily towards attendance. The stated goals of Project Mayhem are to increase regular attendance in our weekend games, and the way folks earn chips for that last tournament now better reflect those goals. In fact, each of these three changes should make jumping into Project Mayhem more appealing to more players. Season 5 began slightly ahead of some of our more regular attendees coming on board, so hopefully more folks being on the ground floor ahead of the start of Season 6 will make PM a bit more appealing to a wider audience this time around.

History

Season 5 Project Mayhem details can be found on that page: Project Mayhem - Season 5.

Results

Summary

Full season results, all 20 tournaments, through 5/11/2013.

PiMPS