Winning Wisdom

At only 27 years old, Gavin Griffin already holds one of the most impressive collections of poker's most prestigious titles: World Series of Poker, European Poker Tour, and World Poker Tour championships.

Now, Card Player is giving its readers a chance to send questions directly to the poker prodigy.

Poker fans can send Griffin their questions to [email protected]. The questions can be about anything from poker strategy to his opinions on certain aspects of poker or his life as a poker pro traveling the circuit. The best questions will be answered by Griffin and published in Card Player. If your question makes it into print, we'll send you a free Card Player T-shirt.

A Look at WCOOP Improvements

In my last column, I shared my thoughts on the PokerStars World Championship of Online Poker. I discussed some of the good things that we saw during these tournaments - the structure, the different games, and certainly the coverage on PokerStars.tv. Most people you talk to will agree that PokerStars runs the best tournaments on the Internet, but they are not without fault. In this column, I will share the things I think could be improved about the WCOOP and tournaments on PokerStars in general.

PokerStars has more players than any other site, more tournaments than any other site, and a greater variety of games than any other site. It has the biggest guaranteed tournament every week in the Sunday Million (now guaranteeing $1.5 million), and also guarantees $400,000 in its Tuesday tournament, $500,000 in the Sunday 500, and $750,000 in the Sunday Warmup. Its weekly tournaments have started to have overlays because it is boosting the guarantees, but the guarantees in the WCOOP were too small, I believe. Only one tournament during the whole series didn't make its guarantee, that being deuce-to-seven no-limit single draw. Every other tournament blew its guarantee out of the water, with the exception of the $25,000 heads-up tournament, which didn't go over the guarantee only because registration was capped.

Let me take this opportunity to go off on a side note a little bit. There is a trend in poker for heads-up tournaments to have limited registration. There have been complaints by players in the past due to the fact that some people get byes. I think it's silly for people to complain about random byes, but if that won't stop, let me suggest a solution. I played a tournament at the Mirage last year that had a nice format for byes. If less than half the field had to play a first-round match while others got a bye, those who had to play the first round received a rebate of half of their buy-in. I think it's silly for a tournament to limit registration for any reason other than space, and I don't really think there needs to be any compensation for people who don't get a bye, but since many players disagree with me on this last point, this is certainly a good solution.

OK, now that that's over, let's get back to the guarantees. More substantial guarantees, especially for games that people don't play as much - like razz, five-card draw, triple draw, and others - would get more people to play these tournaments. Hold'em tournaments are always going to draw well, but it's a bit tougher to garner interest in other tournaments, and increasing the guarantee will help with this.

I was lucky enough to go deep in a few of the WCOOP events this year, and I also did commentary on a few of the final tables. There were few complaints with the tournaments, but the one that continually popped up was the problem with time banks. Most people had enough time bank because most people busted out of the tournament. Over 15 hours or more, though, five minutes is not enough time. There was also a discrepancy between some of the two-day tournaments. Some of them got a new time bank at the end of day one, and some of them didn't. There are several possible solutions to this problem. In the regular one-day tournaments, there is a 15-minute break at the end of six hours. Every time this break comes along, I think everyone's time bank should be replenished. Top everyone off up to where the time bank started and I think everyone would be happy. For the two-day tournaments, in addition to replenishing the bank at every six-hour break, the time bank should be replenished at the beginning of day two. In nonstandard tournaments like shootouts, I think the time bank should be reset after winning each match. I had a big advantage in the quarterfinals of the $25,000 heads-up tournament because Victor Ramdin had used his entire time bank in earlier matches. With so much money on the line in tournaments these days, especially deep in tournaments, it's important that players have enough time to make decisions when a lot of money is on the line. My final complaint with the time bank is the fact that your time bank can be activated if you aren't even logged in to the client when the tournament starts. In the $1,000 pot-limit Omaha tournament, I was a couple of minutes late getting home and missed the first few minutes. I was in the big blind for one of the first few hands and had not logged in yet. As a result, my entire time bank ran down. I should have been considered sitting out, therefore posting and folding automatically. I heard of several other people who had the same problem, so it was definitely not an isolated incident.

My final and biggest complaint with the WCOOP and all of the PokerStars tournaments is the payout structure. I am sternly in favor of paying a large percentage to the winner in all tournaments. Unfortunately, a lot of people don't see it that way. I'm fine with that. I can see paying out more places and taking some of the money out of the top spots. It's hard work to cash in a tournament, and people should be rewarded for it. I disagree with the site's approach to paying out more players. In the main event, 324 players were paid; 324th place paid $8,740 and 19th place paid $22,942. That is a difference of only $14,202, or just less than three buy-ins. Let's compare this with some other tournaments. The World Series of Poker main event this year had 6,844 entrants. They paid 666 players (shouldn't they have paid 675 just for good measure?); 666th place received $21,230, 59th place (the equivalent place of 19th in the WCOOP) paid $115,800, a difference of eight buy-ins. Yes, it's true that it takes longer to get to this point in terms of real hours, so they should be compensated more, but this is a large discrepancy. Since the only other tournament that has a simliar number of entrants as these tournaments do is the World Series of Poker, let's take a look at the biggest tournament ever in the history of poker, the 2006 WSOP main event. Incredibly, 8,773 players played this event; 876 players cashed, with 876th place receiving $10,616 and 76th place (again, the equivalent of 19th in this year's WCOOP main event) paid $65,973, a difference of five buy-ins. This is not a huge difference, but it's made at the expense of paying a large amount for the top spots. Everyone at this final table won more than a million dollars; in fact, the top 12 all won more than a million dollars. This tournament is a good example of a flat payout structure in the low-cash spots and a large amount to the top three. It is evident that you can have the best of both worlds.

Next time, I'll take a look at some of the really impressive things that happened at this year's WCOOP.

Gavin Griffin is a member of Team PokerStars. Visit his website at www.gavingriffin.net.