Poker Handicapping?
 

Do any of you think that it may be possible to handicap a tournament poker?
If so, do you think it would be better to have a lower buy in or more starting chips?

Could there be a mathematical formula used?

Let say the handicapping was used with a group of 30 players (from beginner to expert) where their stats were kept for “X” number of tournaments. Would there be a fair system to play a final tournament where all players had the same chance or is there just too much luck involved in the short run to make any handicapping fair?

Re: Poker Handicapping?
 

wrong forum?

Re: Poker Handicapping?
 

I can't imagine that any sort of handicapping would work in a no-limit tournament. You can give a bad player more chips, and they'll still push everything in when they're beat.

Besides, there already is a mechanism for allowing bad players to stay in a tournament. It's called "rebuy". [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

Re: Poker Handicapping?
 

Rebuys hurt bad players more than good players.

Giving bad players more chips is the only way to really deal with it. No matter how bad a player is and how good his opponent is, it would be possible to set the chipstacks such that the bad player has a 50-50 shot of winning. If you give Phil Hellmuth 1 chip and a huge donkey 1,000,000 chips, the donkey, no matter how bad he is, should beat Hellmuth a large percentage of the tiem.