Can’t chat any more for now. Playing poker.
There is absolutely no reason to do this in online poker. In live poker you do this because it reduces the stack sices and makes it easier to know how much folks have. What’s the point in online play?
If it’s anything like the sites I play, not only are they filled to capacity there are waiting lists and players screaming at each other to unregister so they can get in.
For play money.
A number of sites will no longer allow US players to play in real money games, thanks to the recent passage of the SAFE Ports Act, which includes a section unrelated to port security addressing the transfer of funds from US banks to online gaming sites. The law does not make it illegal for US players to play for real money but a number of the major sites have cut off US players anyway.
Oddly, the number of players from Canada increased dramatically after the cut-off. It’s almost as if a vast number of US players figured out that inputting a fake Canadian address circumvented the US restriction.
I did put a smiley in there. I refuse to play for money online. It takes away too much of the game. I do play from time to time for free. AOL has tournaments sometimes with the top prize being a free bye into the WSOP main event. Of course there are thousands of people playing for one slot so the odds aren’t so good.
Playing in a tourney right now. Started 12:20 pm with 1000 players, now 1:07pm down to 494.
I got busted in today’s tourney, but will try to lurk there until there’s a final table. Then I’ll be able to see what the total chips amount to.
The levels for the blinds and ante keep rising as the tournament proceeds. I’ll let you know about that, too.
Right now: $500 ante, Blinds $1500, 3000
I was wrong. The final Table has close to $10 Million distributed among the players.
Sorry.
Something else to consider I haven’t seen mentioned: Most online tournaments tell you the number of people who signed up (say 1800), but not nearly that many may have actually sat down at the table (especially prevalent in free games). Only the people that actually sit down will bring their 10,000 in chips into play. Also, depending on the site, players that have sat down but are absent after the first or second level of play (or some specific time) may be removed.
For aesthetic reasons. When each player has a million in chips and the blinds are 250k/500k, it would be rather annoying to see your opponents have stacks like, say, “4,267,532.87”. The short and sweet “4268k” looks better and doesn’t affect play. There’s also the fact that coloring up is how live games work and online play is a lot about recreating that live game experience.
All you needed to do was open the tournament lobby and look at the average stack size. It’s simply calculated as the total number of chips in the game divided by the number of remaining players. The total number of chips doesn’t change.
In our tournaments, any player that has placed their seat card, indicating they are there, will get a chip stack. If for some reason, they never return, we just blind them off. So that really shouldn’t be an issue as far as lower chip counts.
However, the race off or color up can take quite a bit off the table. Although, I would not think too terribly much and mostly at the end. We stack the extra chips to decide how much to hand out, I need to have 13 100 unit chips to pass out 3 500 unit chips. If I have 12, I only give out 2 500 unit chips, each table is doing this, so magnify that by say, 15 tables.
In theory, it should all balance out across the tournament, but never underestimate folks ability to pocket chips.
In every onine tournament I’ve ever played anyone who signs up is sat at a table with their chips. If the person is away from the computer or otherwise not playing, they get sat out and are blinded off. They stay at the table and pay the blinds until they go broke. They are not removed from the tournament as long as they have chips.
Just to let you “play money” players in on a little secret… vip.com has like six freerolls every day… a couple with $1,000 prize pools.
First place is like $130 real dollars, and no deposit necessary.
(I’m not affiliated with them in any way)
p.s. sorry to bump… but it’s probably best if we try to keep ^that under our collective hat, rather than shouting from the rooftops… these tourneys are wild enough without thousands more “play money” morons going all in every hand.
A gift to Dopers, perhaps, but if somebody blabs on The Play Money Message Board (heh) or something, the site could institute a predeposit policy.
I appreciate the information, Eleusis, and won’t spread it around.
Fact is, I don’t like to publicize where I play because it’s a good site.
As I said, depending on the site. See here for an example- MTT rule 8.
There is no reason for the final chip count to be much different from the total at the beginning…the only way you would lose chips during the tournament are
1)Players who don’t show up and have their stacks removed(only some places do this)
2)The race offs when lower denomination chips are removed(again, this should about equal out over the field of tables)
3)People taking out chips (I snatched a $25 chip from my stack this year at WSOP before they raced them off, just because I saw several people last year who did it to have a souvenier)…whether it is to have a memento or to put the chip back in play at some later time.
I should add that I’ve seen a player back here with a $1000 chip from the WSOP…which I considered doing once I had over 100K…you figure that one chip won’t really matter if it’s 1% of your stack, and they make nice card guards(but I gave this up after about 5 minutes because they are too light for my liking)