Season IX

Season 8 Recap

We grew our tournament roster by 12 new participants with 33 unique participants over the course of Season 8.  There were a total of 195 entries into tournaments.  These numbers are on par with Seasons 6 & 7 (12-33-202 and 10-31-193).  Project Mayhem participation was down a bit (we lost a few interested players over the course of the season).  We added a fantastic new tournament per Tom's suggestion (a two-stage WSOP final table equivalent, where everyone pays the same amount and the "Quick Tournament" is used to determine the starting chip ranks for the Main Event) and axed the confusing FLaNneL Tournament.  For the most part Season 8 had a lot of continuity with Season 7 events and rules.  I did joggle the Standard Structure to be 12 minute levels for the full duration of the tournament.

The one big change was to the pay outs for the Quick Tournament: we forced an even chop when heads-up.  This was a good change for getting everything moved onto the Main Event without dragging out the Quick Tournament too much.

Attempted to have a bad-beat jackpot at the beginning of the season, but never got too much participation.  Not really much of a degenerate gambler crowd.  Execution was no fun, so we got rid of it by Christmas.

Did a good job on focusing on starting the first tournament as close to 5pm as possible.

Average Main Event ending times for Seasons 5 – 8 (along with average number of participants):

Season 5 - 10:26 PM (7.64 participants per tournament)

Season 6 - 11:08 PM (9.61)

Season 7 - 10:50 PM (9.09)

Season 8 - 10:54 PM (9.38)

At the end of Season 7 I sent out a survey which was very useful in planning for Season 8.  

Here's a depiction of how often we went between game nights.  Season 8 had a couple of back-to-back weekends, which isn't ideal.

Season 9 Plans

Pump up Project Mayhem -- what better incentives can we offer?  [Edits on 8/9/2015:] Bump up the going-rate to $5 per occurrence.  Encourage new unique players (friends-of-friends or direct recruitment?).  Grow stakes?  Yes.  See below.  We seem to be morphing into a more serious crowd of players, and if that's the case then higher stakes may make the game more appealing.  Elongate the levels by a small amount (<10%)?  See below.  (Included these items into the pre Season 9 survey!)  Likely changes would be more incremental than revolutionary.  Do a better job of spacing out the tournaments (we had back-to-back weekends multiple times in the spring, which is not ideal) -- try to get 4 games in prior to New Years.

Changes as of 8/9/2015:

Survey results show some support for one longer tournament rather than two separate shorter games.  Implement this for evenings which would have the Standard Tournament Main Event -- no Quick Tournament on those evenings.  Also support for higher stakes.  On the one-tournament nights, have a $40 buy in (T15,000 starting stack) with $20 rebuys (up to the cut-off level, for T10,000 chips) and one $20 add-on (again, T10,000 chips) if someone didn't use a rebuy.  On the two-tournament nights: $20 Quick Tournament, $30 Main Event tournament (with slightly elongated levels: +1 or 2 minutes).  Project Mayhem buy ins up to $5 on the two-tournament nights, and $10 on the one-tournament nights (but for double PiMPs and Attendance Points).