Innovation in poker is a rarity. Most varieties of the game have remained essentially the same for eons. Surprisingly, though, there have been two developments in the last month that, should they stick, could really make poker interesting in 2013 and the years to come. We discussed one, Aria’s new Multi Action Poker for cash games, earlier in December. Now, UK poker pro Roberto Romanello has developed a tournament format, Multi Prizepool Poker.
Multi Prizepool Poker (MPP) is just what it sounds like – the tournament features more than one prizepool. In an MPP tournament, there are three different buy-ins. All players are eligible for the prizepool created by the lowest buy-in (we’ll call this Level 1), while players at the higher buy-ins may grab portions of the prizepools formed by the addition buy-in amounts.
Thus, if a Level 1 player wins the entire tournament, he will win the first prize for just the Level 1 prize pool. If a Level 2 player wins, he will win the first prize for both the Level 2 and Level 1 prize pools, since his buy-in covered both levels. If a Level 3 player wins, he wins all three first prizes.
In the first scenario where the Level 1 player wins the tournament, there is, of course, the Levels 2 and 3 first prizes to award. In this case, the player that finishes the highest from each of those levels will win their respective first prize. It doesn’t matter where they finish overall – it just matters where they finish compared to the competitors on their level.
Let’s take a look at an example.
First place goes to a Level 1 player, who wins the first prize from Level 1 and Level 1 only. Second place also goes to a Level 1 player, who naturally wins the second prize from Level 1. If then a Level 2 player comes in third, he will receive the third prize from Level 1, since his Level 2 buy-in qualifies him for the Level 1 prizepool. He will also win the first prize from Level 2, as he is the highest finisher from that level. If a Level 3 player comes in fourth overall, he will get the fourth prize from Level 1, the second prize from Level 2, and the first prize from Level 3.
Let’s also look at a prize pool calculation:
Level 1 Players: 100
Level 2 Players: 40
Level 3 Players: 20
Level 1 Buy-in: $25; Prizepool: (100 Level 1 Players + 40 Level 2 Players + 20 Level 3 Players) x $25 = $4,000
Level 2 Buy-in: $50; Prizepool: (40 + 20) x $25 = $1,500
Level 3 Buy-in: $100; Prizepool: 20 x $50 = $1,000
Note that the calculations for the Level 2 and 3 prizepools are calculated with the excess buy-in over the levels below.
The main goals of Multi Prizepool Poker are to allow lower stakes players to be able to participate in tournaments with higher stakes poker pros while not being scared of the money involved as well as creating larger tournament fields as players that would normally compete in separate tournaments come together in one, unified field.
Multi Prizepool Poker will debut at Nottingham’s Dusk Till Dawn casino on January 10th with a £5,000 guaranteed tournament.
This is an awesome idea, and I’d love to see it implemented online. For U.S. players, MTT pools are so small that it’s not even worth playing them a lot of times. This would be great for increasing field sizes. Thumbs up.