Poker Tournament Payout Changes Needed ASAP!

Just getting started on this article was tough, as the message is not one everyone in the poker community will embrace in the short run. In fact, many top tournament players will read this article and immediately dismiss the idea as being too conservative, or perhaps overreaching. I’m talking about poker tournament payouts and how they are currently handled by the majority of casinos and tournament directors. The standard is to pay out ten percent of the field, leaving the other ninety percent to head home empty handed with their collective tails between their legs. What I would propose as an alternative is simple, and will keep more players in action for the long term best interest of the poker and greater gambling communities. Let’s try paying out twenty percent of the field as the new normal, the new standard if you will. The reasons are clear, yet seem to elude many of the decision-makers when it comes to organizing poker tournaments.

Global Economy in a Recession – Let’s face it, European and the United States economies are in a tailspin. Local municipalities as well as entire governments can’t pay their bills, and the solutions to their issues are complex and may take years to iron out. While certain parts of the world, namely the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) are experiencing growth and huge demands for the world’s resources, the rest of us are wondering how long we’ll have a job, when we’ll find another job, or what will happen if we get laid off or downsized. OK, enough of the current events lesson, and back to what this means for the poker community. The majority of tournament players at any given venue are the local players, the men and women who work regular jobs and play on nights, weekends, and their days off. These people have limited extra money after each paycheck, people with families to take on vacations, wives to buy birthday presents for, and if there is extra money beyond that, perhaps a five hundred dollar tournament that weekend at their home casino. How many times a year will these local weekend warriors play a poker tournament if they rarely ever finish in the money? How many times will they crawl home and explain to their family that they bubbled the tournament, again.

Start paying out twenty percent of the field, and there will be ten percent more smiles, ten percent more finished in the money stories, ten percent more dreamers who will then attempt to parlay their recent winnings in the blackjack section, the craps pit, or the next poker tournament. Cash is king, and without disposable income flowing into tournament poker, our community suffers and feels the immediate impact.

Finding a backer will be easier – Poker tournaments are a tough nut to crack, even when you are playing well and running well. Find yourself on the wrong side of variance for a few tournament runs and it’s game over, or at least, plan B. Tournament backers are a rare breed these days. Stories of multiple horses buried in makeup are plentiful in the tournament poker backing arena. Beating tournament poker has become more and more difficult as everyone’s play has improved in no-limit hold’em since the Moneymaker boom. The poker world is dog eat dog, where survival of the fittest rules. If we collectively pay more finishers in these tournaments, more recreational players will flock to the tournaments, which in turn will lead to more professional players showing up to feed on the weaker members of the herd. Backers are investors plain and simple, and will be more than willing to invest in solid tournament professionals on a larger scale if the field sizes increase and the number of non-professionals frequenting the tournaments increases.

Casinos will see an immediate jump in revenue – More players paid means longer hotel stays, more meals eaten in the casino restaurants, more shopping from players and their families, and more pit gambling. The math is simple, if you spread the money around to a greater number of players, the entire community stays afloat longer. I’m going to let you in on a little secret, and it may not be the message people want to hear, but the casinos want to bust us, every single one of us! Casinos are in business to make money, they don’t make money unless we drop it off in the restaurants, the shops, the poker tournament buy-ins, and the casino games. The smart casinos in my opinion will make every effort to bust people over time, slowly.

The Harrah’s and the MGM’s of the casino world face massive pressure from Native American venues and overseas venues competing for that finite pool of gambling money. These huge corporations are motivated by profits and their stakeholder’s insatiable desire for more and greater profits than the last fiscal quarter. Make no mistake about it, these corporations face tough decisions on whether to increase the buy-ins, how to dole out comps, and how to cut costs without sacrificing player benefits to the point people revolt and walk out the door to the next casino.

Long-term best interest of the game – Poker tournaments and gambling aren’t going by the wayside anytime soon, so don’t rush to call me an alarmist just yet. Take a few minutes and look at the new World Series of Poker Circuit events for the 2012-2013 season. The first thing you will notice if you’re a current or former nit like me is that the juice went up from last year. Now I’m not picking on Harrah’s with this observation, this is merely stating a fact. When Harrah’s revamped the circuit last year, the changes of lowering the buy-ins in the preliminary and main events was a huge success in terms of getting year over year increases in the number of players competing on the circuit. This success inevitably led the powers that be to determine the huge demand for their tournaments warranted an increase in the juice.

The juice for many years was ten percent of the buy-in amount, or lower. The juice on many events now easily surpasses ten percent of the buy-in amount. This business model will fail eventually, as the weaker players bust out, and find an alternative recreational pursuit for their entertainment dollars. One solution to keep everyone in action longer is to pay out twenty percent of the field as the new standard.
A long time Los Angeles-based mixed-game player named Steve recently passed away a few weeks after I saw him at the 2012 WSOP, my condolences to his friends and family. I’ll never forget what Steve said to me when I first met him at the Commerce Casino. He said he truly didn’t care if he was playing with yellow chips (five dollar chips) or white chips (hundred dollar chips) as long as he was in action. Now that is someone whose love of the game was more important than the color of the chips he was playing with on any given day. I know there are a lot of us in the poker community like Steve, who are genuinely happy to be in action, look forward to playing each time we venture to the casino, and who want to be in action today and fifty years from today. Let’s think about ways we can all help the poker community stay in action for the long haul, and don’t be afraid to voice your opinions to the poker room managers and tournament directors of the world if you agree some changes are in order for the best interest of the game we love. ♠

Jonathan Green is a Commercial Manager for the General Electric Company and a semi-professional poker player, currently living in Los Angeles, CA.  Jonathan spent 2004-2011 living and playing on the east coast tournament trail, with annual trips to the WSOP since 2007. In between tournaments, Jonathan can be found playing middle limit mixed cash games in L.A. and Vegas. All feedback is welcome at [email protected].