Palms freeroll

The Palms poker room just started a series of weekly freeroll tournaments for frequent customers. They use a structure unlike any I've seen before.

If you play 12 hours in the preceeding week, you qualify to sit in a single-table satellite. You can qualify for additional satellites for more hours of play. The last two standing in each satellite receive $100 and entry to the main tournament, where $3000 is up for grabs ($1000 for 1st, $400 for 2nd, $300 for 3rd, $200 for 4th, and $100 for 5th through 15th).

So far so good, at least in theory. But in practice, there are problems.

The first problem is scheduling. You don't pick or get assigned to a specific time for your satellite. They are run from 2 p.m. to 8 p.m. on Tuesday. You show up, they add you to the list. I arrived at 2:05 Tuesday, and found that the first satellite had just started, the list for the second one was already full, so I was placed on the list for the 3rd. They thought it might start between 3:00 and 3:30.

As it turned out, the first one took an hour. They started the second, and I was thinking I'd have to wait another hour. But then they decided to start #3 with a second dealer while #2 was still running. It got underway at 3:20. But the point is that you can't really know when you'll be playing. You might arrive at 4:00 and find that there are five full satellites ahead of you, and you won't play until 8:00. I also don't know what they do if you arrive at, say, 7:30 and they don't get enough to fill up another satellite. Are you just out of luck? Do they run a short-handed satellite? And what if you arrive at 7:30 and there are four or five full satellites? Will they keep running them past the announced close time of 8:00? I don't know.

The main tournament is run on Wednesday evening. This means that basically you have to expect to spend all or most of Tuesday afternoon or evening and Wednesday evening on this tournament. With no definite times for Tuesday, this is a big commitment of time to expect people to make on a weekly basis. Of course, if there are tables running, you can play cash games and be building hours toward the next week's qualification, if you are so inclined. But those may not be the optimal times for playing (i.e., the room will likely then have more locals than tourists, compared to prime evening/night hours).

There's another huge problem with the satellites: the structure. You start with 1200 in chips, and the first round of blinds are 100/100. That's right--you start with 12 big blinds, and an "M" of 6. Blinds go up every 15 minutes: 100/200, 200/400, 300/600, 500/1000/100, etc. You can buy an optional 500 chips for a $3 dealer contribution, which everybody does, of course.

This is the most ridiculously short-stacked tournament structure I've ever seen in any venue. In the first level, suppose you make a standard 3x BB raise from the cutoff, the button calls, and the big blind calls. Now the pot contains 1000 chips, and you have 900 left (or 1400 if you've done the optional chip purchase). Your only rational choices after the flop are to shove or fold. That's it. That's your shot. That's your whole tournament. One hand.

It's so absurdly biased toward luck over skill that I would literally prefer that they just randomly pick 20% of the qualifiers' names to receive the $100 and tournament entry. It would be just as fair and would save hundreds of currently wasted man-hours. Post the winners' names on the Palms web site and be done with it. You then wouldn't have dozens of people having to drive over, sit around for an unknown number of hours to play what often boils down to a one-hand luckfest tournament.

As it stands, the time commitment and stupid structure are such big turn-offs that I don't think I'll be making much effort to qualify for for these things. If I happen to put in two or three longish sessions at the Palms in a week and qualify, OK, I'll endure it. But in my opinion, the Palms has made their freeroll so unappealing in terms of time commitment and structure that it's not worth much extra effort to try for. If instead of weekly they made it a $20,000 monthly deal for, say, 40 hours of rated play, I would find it more interesting, because I'd only have to be making those additional two trips out there for unknown amounts of time once a month instead of once a week.