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Micro Masters League 2021: Teaser Trailer
NOSTRI
Member Posts: 1,459
in Poker Chat
Good morning.
Many regulars here might recall that I used to run a small league for small stakes MTT players called the Micro Masters League, a name I shamelessly stole from a Party Poker promotion. For those unaware, the long and short of it is we collected participants' results from a series of micro- and low-stakes MTTs over a week and gave tickets to the £33 main events and Sunday Major as prizes to@lewjax79 those who did best.
Straight to the point: the MML is coming back.
We ran this for a few months the first time around, with impressively minimal assistance from @waller02, at a time when I had quite a lot of free time on my hands. Ultimately, I got quite busy with other things and it became too much of an imposition on my day-to-day life, so with great sadness we put it to bed. It was an extraordinarily fun community project though and there has hardly been a week where I didn't miss it, so I've been looking into ways to bring it back and make it easier on myself, not without a certain amount of prodding and begging from @tikay.
As the existence of this thread might suggest, I think I've figured out a way to run it without it being a huge time investment, so it will soon make its triumphant return. Don't ask me when, I don't know yet.
The vast majority of the rules and details will remain the same, so I would encourage anyone unfamiliar with the league to have a ganders at the old thread to get up to speed on what this is.
For now, I want to use this thread to:
We spent the last month or so of the league's life wanting to fix this, but it was a bigger task than it may seem and involved rewriting a lot of code. This time, I'm trying to make sure that's better from the get go.
Here's the new formula that's going to be used for calculating points:
The way this works is, you get one point for each qualifying tournament you play, and then additional points according to this formula for finishing in the top 20% of the field.
I've borrowed this from a different poker site that runs the occasional leaderboard promotion, and implemented it without changes for now. I can already see a few tweaks it may benefit from but I thought it would be nice to see what everyone else thought about it too.
It's a bit complicated, so here's an illustration of how the scores would compute for all the final table positions, top 10% of the field, and top 20% of the field, in different sized fields:
As you can see, winning a 500-man tournament nets around three times as many points as winning a 50-man tournament.
Importantly, it infers no bonus at the moment for making the final table, as the previous system used to, and actually doesn't even care whether you're ITM or not. It's purely based on finishing position inside the top 20%.
The nice thing about this is that it will allow us to include some of the less popular MTTs with very small fields on the schedule, which we previously disallowed as we felt winning them gave too much of an advantage.
So: How does that look? Should there still be a boost for making the FT? Should being ITM be an important factor?
Would be interested to hear what people think about this.
Many regulars here might recall that I used to run a small league for small stakes MTT players called the Micro Masters League, a name I shamelessly stole from a Party Poker promotion. For those unaware, the long and short of it is we collected participants' results from a series of micro- and low-stakes MTTs over a week and gave tickets to the £33 main events and Sunday Major as prizes to
Straight to the point: the MML is coming back.
We ran this for a few months the first time around, with impressively minimal assistance from @waller02, at a time when I had quite a lot of free time on my hands. Ultimately, I got quite busy with other things and it became too much of an imposition on my day-to-day life, so with great sadness we put it to bed. It was an extraordinarily fun community project though and there has hardly been a week where I didn't miss it, so I've been looking into ways to bring it back and make it easier on myself, not without a certain amount of prodding and begging from @tikay.
As the existence of this thread might suggest, I think I've figured out a way to run it without it being a huge time investment, so it will soon make its triumphant return. Don't ask me when, I don't know yet.
The vast majority of the rules and details will remain the same, so I would encourage anyone unfamiliar with the league to have a ganders at the old thread to get up to speed on what this is.
For now, I want to use this thread to:
- Talk about scoring
- Get feedback other miscellaneous things during development
- Gather signups
Scoring
One of the main sticking points of the previous MML was that the scoring was a little unfair. You got the same number of points for winning, say, the £1 Rebuy, typically a 50-or-so runner affair, as you did for winning the Mini, which attracts closer to 500 runners.We spent the last month or so of the league's life wanting to fix this, but it was a bigger task than it may seem and involved rewriting a lot of code. This time, I'm trying to make sure that's better from the get go.
Here's the new formula that's going to be used for calculating points:
The way this works is, you get one point for each qualifying tournament you play, and then additional points according to this formula for finishing in the top 20% of the field.
I've borrowed this from a different poker site that runs the occasional leaderboard promotion, and implemented it without changes for now. I can already see a few tweaks it may benefit from but I thought it would be nice to see what everyone else thought about it too.
It's a bit complicated, so here's an illustration of how the scores would compute for all the final table positions, top 10% of the field, and top 20% of the field, in different sized fields:
As you can see, winning a 500-man tournament nets around three times as many points as winning a 50-man tournament.
Importantly, it infers no bonus at the moment for making the final table, as the previous system used to, and actually doesn't even care whether you're ITM or not. It's purely based on finishing position inside the top 20%.
The nice thing about this is that it will allow us to include some of the less popular MTTs with very small fields on the schedule, which we previously disallowed as we felt winning them gave too much of an advantage.
So: How does that look? Should there still be a boost for making the FT? Should being ITM be an important factor?
Would be interested to hear what people think about this.
Comments
As an ex champion, obv IN btw.
First look 3x seems high to me, gives the players who have less time to play less chance of winning 2x would be a better fit imo.
Because you know the games that are involved and therefore know what the expected field size is, the points structure for each individual game could be fixed, this way its easier for players to know what they need to do and make point scoring easier.
Cant remember the full structure and don't have time the look at the thread but there seemed to be far too many games for all but 10% of participants to have a chance. Are you looking at reducing the number of qualifying games? or looking to add PLO or none BH PLO8. (*edit, the field sizes for these are probably way too low)
What about using each players best 5, 10, 20 ect scores, is this on the table.
I think a boost should be there somewhere for a final table of top 5% finish, this could be set as a standard figure across the board.
Sorry but you did ask, and i have given this some thought over time.
But one point per entry wont be enough for me to catch up.
Edit: FWIW, i think the points system is pretty spot on, you need a pretty healthy multiplier for winning the mini compared to a 50 runner - if anything x3 is on the smaller side. I can also get behind a +2-5 points for ITM and + 5-10 points for FT or something to that effect.
> Cant remember the full structure and don't have time the look at the thread but there seemed to be far too many games for all but 10% of participants to have a chance. Are you looking at reducing the number of qualifying games? or looking to add PLO or none BH PLO8.
I don't think that's the case at all, to be quite frank. The available games are already split across a few different buy-in levels and I don't expect almost any participants to play all of them. This was reflected in the stats from the last league, when hardly anyone played even close to all of the games.
In the last league table I compiled (which only lasted 5 days, not the usual 7), the average participant played only around 7 of the games, with the top half of the field averaging 10 games, and the top 10 averaging 13 games. That was out of a possible 38 games. So clearly there is some advantage to playing more, but there wasn't a huge gap and playing all of the schedule was never necessary.
Which is all to say, the top 4 in the league (those who won prizes) were not often simply the ones who put the most volume in. The most recent winner of the league actually only played 8 games all week. In the previous league, at least, it was perfectly possible to win without playing a lot of games and many did. Ultimately, it tended to be the case that anyone who managed to put up a few decent results had a good shot at winning the league, which is roughly as it should be.
I do expect that equalizing effect to be neutered a little with the new formula, which distributes points a little more evenly across all finishing positions and infers less of a boost to FT positions, but I am still fairly sure volume won't be the sole deciding factor in finishing positions. I will keep an eye on that, of course, and make adjustments if it seems necessary. On reflection, I think one easy adjustment I should make is to remove the part of the equation that gives you 1 point simply for playing, which will slightly negate the volume advantage. Beyond that, I think a wait-and-see approach is best. I am already testing this with a small group of people to see what kind of score ranges it produces, so if changes need to be made they will be.
Ultimately, someone who can't or won't play all the games available to them is going to fare worse than someone who can, on average, and I'm not going to bend over backwards to try to eliminate that advantage; it's the nature of a league that you have to show up to do well.
As for how the schedule will change, I haven't thought about that yet. Some of the games on it no longer run so it will certainly not be exactly the same but I'm not currently planning to make huge changes. It crossed my mind that some of the PLO/PLO8 games could be included, but I think it's best not to include games that are already included in a separate league such as yours. The FTT games were never included for the same reason. Again, I'm open to arguments about that.
> What about using each players best 5, 10, 20 ect scores, is this on the table.
The possibility of using each person's best X scores doesn't seem very appealing to me. Part of the reason the current formulation works well is that a player who strings together a series of small results can still compete with someone who manages to bink the Mini. If we only count their best, say, 10 results, that no longer becomes as possible and someone who manages to win in a larger field becomes much more unbeatable. I'm open to convincing if someone can make a strong case for it, but on the face of it I don't think it will do much for the competitiveness of the league and actively make it less competitive.
> Because you know the games that are involved and therefore know what the expected field size is, the points structure for each individual game could be fixed, this way its easier for players to know what they need to do and make point scoring easier.
Not going to do this, since the scoring formula already does it, as demonstrated in the spreadsheet screenshot. In effect, the points structure for the different field sizes is already fixed. It may be a little opaque to those who may not find the formula easy to understand, but I'll happily provide some more spreadsheet models to clear it up if anyone would like me to.
> I think a boost should be there somewhere for a final table of top 5% finish, this could be set as a standard figure across the board.
Definitely something that will be considered. Sticking to the wait-and-see for now to see how the test runs look.
Bravo for hosting this again Nos.
I’d not worry about boosting points for FT appearances as that only serves to weight back towards the smaller fields.
Good luck, well done on bringing it back, and hopefully it doesn’t become too much of a chore again.
Happy with the point structure you mentioned.