2009 WSOP: Triple Your Pleasure, Triple Your Fun?

Shamus has been exploring what the potential effect of the new "triple starting stacks" at this year's WSOP will be. He's expressed some concern about dreadfully long Day 2s (Day 2 is always the worst because rather than play a set number of levels, the tournament has to play down to a set number of players).

I don't think Shamus needs to worry too much about Day 2s as long as the fields of any events he covers are not huge. The size of the starting stack doesn't really change a tournament all that much. The bigger determinant of the pace of play is the structure versus the total chips in play.

[If I could drop footnotes, I'd drop one here to counter the inevitable comment someone will make to this post. It goes like this: Commenter asks, "Doesn't the size of the starting stack affect the total chips in play?" Of course the answer is yes, but a much bigger impact on the total chips in play is the size of the field. A 500-player field with 30k starting chips will still play faster than a 1,000-player field with 20k starting chips.]

Don't get me wrong. Having a triple starting stack allows players to be more patient in the early-going because there is less pressure from the blinds. But at some point, the pressure from the blinds will catch up to the total number of chips in play and force players to bust out, no matter how many are left in the field. In my experience, the point that the number of chips in play catches up to the structure for a NLHE tournament is when the average stack is about 40 BBs.

[Next footnote: Different calculations apply for games other than NLHE.]

Once that happens, the average stack will remain close to 40 BBs for the rest of the tournament and the pace of eliminations will match accordingly, no matter how many chips are in play. At that point, since the average stack will always remain close to 40 BBs, the speed of the tournament is dictated solely by the structure and by the pace of the blind increases. If there are 300 players left, blinds 5k/10k, average stack 40 BBs (400k), then at the next level (6k/12k) you'll quickly get to a point where there are 250 players left in the field, average stack 40 BBs (480k). It's just a question of at what point in the tournament you reach the magical 40 BB average stack. Even with 300 BB starting stacks, it comes sooner than you think.

2009 EPT Monte Carlo is a good example. Players started with 30k in chips and blinds at 50 and 100. With 300 big blinds in the starting stack, EPT Monte Carlo qualified as a "deep stack" tournament by almost any definition. The structure (viewable here) was as generous a structure as a player can expect. Yet at the start of Day 2, after eight levels of play on Day 1, there were 535 players left of the original 935, blinds of 500/1000, and the average stack was already down to 52.5 BBs (52,500).

By the start of Day 3 (where players were still 50 spots off the money), the tournament caught up to the structure. Six levels of play on Day 2 brought players the following conditions at the start of Day 3: blinds 2,500/5,000, 138 players remained, average stack 40.6 BBs (203,000).

Day 4: blinds 12k / 24k, 31 players, average stack 37.7 BBs (905k).

Day 5: blinds 40k / 80k, 8 players, average stack 43.8 BBs (3.5MM).

It's not an exact science of course, as you can see. Sometimes a level or two will play a little faster than 40 BBs and sometimes one or two will play a little slower. But the tournament will always tend towards that 40-BB marker.

I had to giggle when the EPT staff said they weren't sure how the new EPT structure and starting chips, used for the first time in Monte Carlo, would change the speed of the tournament. Unless the level increases are achingly small, the extra chips don't change all that much. Once you know the total number of chips in play, the rest is just math. It becomes very easy to predict almost exactly at which level you'll reach the final table.

[Footnote: Final tables are a bit trickier, because once play is less than five-handed all guidelines are out the window.]

The difference: 935 players, 30k starting stack, eight-handed final table predicted to be reached in Level 28 (40k/80k). 935 players, 20k starting stack, final table predicted to be reached in either Level 26 (25k/50k) or Level 27 (30k/60k). So giving players an extra 50% in chips would result in adding one or two levels to the tournament. That's it.

Enjoy those triple stacks while you can, kids.