Why are the levels so freakin' short?

[Jordan Olsommer]

I recall having read in Jim McManus's "Positively Fifth Street" where he was looking forward to playing the WSOP Media Event as practice for the Big One, and the fellow he was talking to said he shouldn't see it as practice since it had 15-minute levels and was therefore pretty much a "crapshoot".

And it occurred to me that almost every tournament I play online has 10- or 11-minute levels, and that one of the sites I play on (PR) was tooting its own horn for offering a tournament with 15-minute blind levels (the thinking man's tournament! [img]/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img]).

So I guess the obvious questions would be
a) are these 11-, 12-, and 15-minute level tournaments really crapshoots?
and
b) are there any sites out there with 30+ minute level tournaments with reasonable buyins (i.e. not just the "play with the pros!" $1,000 buyin tournament that lasts three days)?

Anyone have any insight into this?

[Lloyd]

How fast a tournament structure is in part is based on the buy-in. Larger buy-in tournies have slower structures. After all, if you bought in for $5-10K you don't want to be blinded down almost right from the beginning.

You cannot compare the blind level of an online tourney to that of a live tourney because more hands are dealt per hour online. So an online tourney with 15 minute blind levels probably deals about 75% more hands in that time. It's the equivalent of around a 25 minute blind level live.

Having a fast structure definitely changes how you should play. You can't wait around for a monster. You need to push small edges and build a stack quickly. And if you get too involved with a hand, you're probably playing for all your chips. It offers an interesting balance between playing speculative hands that offer great implied odds and knowing when to get out of a hand before it becomes too expensive.

I've seen some online tournies with 20 minute blind levels but the buy-in is pretty high.

[gumpzilla]

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b) are there any sites out there with 30+ minute level tournaments with reasonable buyins (i.e. not just the "play with the pros!" $1,000 buyin tournament that lasts three days)?

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The only online tournament with 30 minute levels that I can remember hearing of was the Paradise Masters tournament, of which they just had the second one this past weekend. Given that it sounds like they fell $200k short of the guarantee it wouldn't surprise me too much if they don't do that again for a little while. Also, it had a $600 buyin, so it wasn't your kind of thing. It wouldn't surprise me if there were other 30 minute level tournaments, but I'd imagine they are all on a similar scale.

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Anyone have any insight into this?

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It's actually pretty obvious, in my opinion. Faster levels = getting tournaments done quicker. At low buyins this will attract a larger audience (I don't think many players want to spend all day playing in a poker tournament). Also, since you're paying rake and not a time charge, it's in their interest to get it done as fast as possible once you've paid the rake. They can't make it too fast because they'd lose a lot of players who didn't like the structure, but they'll make it as fast as they possibly can, as a rule.

[eMarkM]

Fifteen mintute levels are perfect for online tourneys as far as I'm concerned. As others have pointed out you play far more hands in that time than a live event with the same escalation interval. There's plenty of play in these events. The bigger sats on Stars that send you to the WSOP or the Carribean tourney have 30 min levels and they have tons of play, but they take forever to finish.

I run the King of the Zoo series (shameless plug: http://www.kingofthezoo.com - we have an event tomorrow) and we have 20 min levels. We get 45-55 players in an event and even our tourneys can drag on for awhile. 15 min levels with 200 players leads to an event that takes around four hours. I think there are sites that need to tweak their blind levels as I think they escalate a little too harshly, but the time periods of 15-20 mins are perfect. You have to strike some balance between having play and getting the thing done.

[Jordan Olsommer]

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It's actually pretty obvious, in my opinion.

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I appreciate your insight, but I don't think it's obvious at all, once you consider the fact that B&M cardrooms have huge overhead expenses and apparently run tournaments with reasonable blind structures, and online cardrooms have almost no overhead (the cost of adding a new tournament to the schedule is within epsilon of zero) and offer up 10-minute level tournaments exclusively.

In my opinion, there's no reason whatsoever that online cardrooms couldnt offer tournaments (guaranteed is a different story, but regular prize-pool distribution tournaments) and SNGs with reasonable levels, for the same reason that many online sites offer games like pineapple or five-card stud - who cares if nobody plays? It costs almost nothing to set up!

*edit: of course, like other posters mentioned, you'd have to 'adjust' these figures for the increased amount of hands online. So for example, the WSOP has two-hour levels, and if you saw twice as many hands online as the WSOP, a "WSOP-equivalent" tournament in terms of luck would have 1-hour levels. Three times as many hands would make a 40-minute level tournament WSOP-equivalent, etc, so it's not just "B&M tourneys are x-minute levels - online tourneys should be x-minute levels too!", it's "B&M tourneys have a skill factor of x - online tourneys should have a skill factor of x too! (or as close as is reasonable to achieve)"

[sandrew]

I have to agree with the rest of the posts about why online levels are short. It is relative to the number of hands delt per hr.

I have played in a couple of B&M weekly tournaments that have real short blind structures so that the games move, most of them with rebuys. Those tend to be more of a crap shoot and a bit more difficult to play.