I was playing at the Rio again this afternoon. I noticed at the front desk copies of the above flyer advertising a new freeroll tournament series.
If I'm reading this right, it is a daily freeroll, with qualification requiring a mere three hours of play in the preceding 24 hours. The other side says that this begins July 14th.
That, my friends, is strange. I have never seen anything like it.
I'm really not sure what to make of it. On the one hand, it's nice that you can get a shot at a piece of $2000 for just three hours of play.
On the other hand, it's easy to foresee problems. For one thing, with the daily tournament starting at 6:00 p.m., it must have an atrocious structure, so as to get the event over with quickly and not interfere with the cash games that peak in the evening.
For another, they run the risk of killing the cash games at that time every night. That's pretty much my prime time, and if the cash games turn out to routinely break up just before 6:00 p.m. on days when I haven't qualified for the tournament, it's going to cheese me off and cause me to stop frequenting the place.
I don't have any good way of gauging how many people are likely to both qualify and want to play every day, so it's really hard to guess in advance what one's EV would be for participating. It would not surprise me if the thing didn't actually run most days, and devolved into an automatic chop (proportionate to the starting chip stack that one qualified for, presumably), like the weekly Luxor freeroll used to.
It's weird, and I'm not yet sure whether I think it's a good thing, a bad thing, or kind of neutral. I guess I'll have to see how it pans out with time.
Friday, July 10, 2009
Peculiar new promotion at the Rio poker room
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5 comments:
You are, in fact, NOT reading it right. :)
It says "weekly" freeroll at the top there.
Okay, I'll grant you it's confusing as heck what with "weekly" up top and "daily" in the middle.
I have NO IDEA what they're trying to do here.
Cardgrrl: I almost put in a note about that very thing, anticipating that somebody would make a comment like yours. On the front of the flyer (you're seeing the back), it further confuses things by saying, at the top, "The Rio Poker Room is not the home of the $14,000 Weekly Freeroll Series." So on the front it's "$14,000 weekly freeroll series," and on the back it's $2,000 weekly freeroll series." It's a complete mess. But my best guess is that they mean they're giving away $2000/day, $14,000/week. But for all I know, there might be a daily one AND a separate weekly one.
Not exactly a model of clarity, this thing.
Uh, make that "now" rather than "not" where I'm quoting the front of the flyer. Sorry. Even the Rio isn't THAT confusing.
We did daily freerolls at the Pink Chicken for a while before I left there. It worked pretty well. We ran the tournaments at 10am. You could qualify all the way up to 6am. We generally got good cash games out of that as well.
Like you, I don't get starting at 6pm, but I'm sure they have a reason. So long as they can generate some cash game play out of the freeroll, it ought to be good for the room...
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