A guy around the corner runs a small poker tournament every Friday night, usually 25-30 players, and the price doesn’t make any sense to me.
The initial buy in is $50. If you arrive on time to start at 7 PM, your $50 gets you 12000 tournament chips plus a 5000 chip bonus, so in effect, everyone starts with 17000. If you are knocked out in the first round round - so before 9 PM - you can rebuy for $50, which only buys you the basic 12000 chips.
The first four 30-minute levels are 100-200, 200-400, 300-600, 400-800.
But there’s the thing - after a 20-minute pizza break at 9 PM, you can top up your stack for $40. This gets you FORTY THOUSAND chips. In effect, your stack is almost certainly doubling even if you had a great first two hours.
This strikes me as being… weird. The $40 top up is so disproportionate that it seems to me it doesn’t make any sense to risk much prior to that, right? SHould I not play ultra tight and then start attacking after the top up? Because some people don’t. One guy at my first table last night rebought four times before 9 PM.
It makes perfect sense for the organizer. Assuming that a few players dominate the first round, and those who are losing rebuy, the 9 pm top off ensures that it pushes everyone back to an almost level field with just the couple of top players probably stacking more than twice the 40k chips. That’s a huge incentive for players to hang around and pitch in another $40. Assuming half the players buy back in on the first round and then at least 80% of the players top up, that’s about an extra $500, and it appeals to the people who think they just had a bad beat and are going to get lucky on the plus up. Or as Mike McDermott says: “If you can’t spot the sucker in the first half hour at the table, you are the sucker.”