Equity v Equality: Context about Women in Poker
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Late Registration Needs To Be Curbed
The Origin Of Late Registration
I’m old enough to remember when there was no such thing as late registration. If you wanted to play a poker tournament, you had to show up at the beginning. Games rarely started on time, mostly because the organizer waited for the usual suspects to rustle up a buy-in. Then, some innovative person had an idea… “Why don’t we let people buy-in for a short period after the start time?”
Late registration was born and it was almost universally adopted. There were a few purists who didn’t like it, believing that it corrupted the integrity of the tournament, but, for the most part, it was welcomed as a smart idea. However, as time went on, the period of late registration extended longer and longer. With most of the tournaments starting at 2pm, organizers tried to facilitate people coming from their 9-5 jobs.
What began as a grace period of an hour or two became a four hour window. Again, the purists spoke up but organizers saw the advantages of attracting more players and, in turn, allowing re-entry for a longer period. The game was growing and bigger prize pools were more attractive. Late registration allowed organizers to be braver with their guarantees.
The Early Bird Gets Their Worm Devalued
As successful poker players got more sophisticated, they began to understand better where their EV (expected value) came from. There was a moment of epiphany when players shifted from the view that starting later with a sub-average stack was disadvantageous to the realization that it was actually an advantage to buy-in after others had already busted.
The ‘ICM-bump’ enjoyed by late-comers has to come from somewhere in a zero-sum game and sharp players realized that it came from the early birds, who may have caught themselves some worms but who ultimately had the value of those worms reduced by the max-late-reggers. This created a ‘if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em’ mentality amongst the pros with more and more of them opting for last minute late registration. You cannot blame a player for doing what is in their best interest but you can blame an organizer for creating a structure than can be so blatantly exploited.
As soon as the benefits of late registration became common knowledge, steps should have been taken to reduce the period in which it was permissible. Incredibly though, it seemed to go the other way with organizers extending it further. There was implicit collusion between the organizers and sharp players that later late registration deep into the tournament meant more rake (with a lower impact on dealer costs) and more profitable spots.
Egregious
Cut to the present day and we now see an egregious amount of late registration, both live and online. ACR (Americas Cardroom) has tournaments in which you can buy 5 big blinds. Last year at a stop on the GUKPT (Grosvenor UK Poker tour), it was possible to buy 6 big blinds in their high-roller. The WSOP has also embraced late registration way too deep into the tournament with players being allowed to buy as few as 10 big blinds with 70% of the field already eliminated.
In the case of the WSOP, the issue is compounded by the fact that taking the last minute late registration option is now so popular that the queue of people getting in at the last possible moment stretches from one end of a very large room to the other, before snaking along the edge of the room and sometimes out into the corridor. The consequence of this is players not getting in until way into the new level or, in the case of the faster structures, even into the level after that.
Some basic ICM calculations have shown that a player coming in with half the field already gone can, depending on blind level lengths and structure, receive as much as 28% bump on the value of his stack while a player coming in with two-thirds of the field eliminated could be getting a 35% bump. That’s a huge amount of equity being stolen, mostly from those who sweated and toiled from the beginning of the day, players who are more likely to tire in the later stages of the day due to decision fatigue and just being less fresh.
+EV Hack
I played one WSOP tournament this year which allowed players who were at the back of the queue to stroll over to tables with just 7 big blinds, less than 90 minutes from the money. One player told me that thanks to slow-folding (something most of the late reggers were doing) and two fortuitous table breaks, he played just 26 hands, paid just one round of blinds, never voluntarily put a chip into the middle and managed to fold into the ‘double the buy-in’ min-cash.
Once again, I place no blame on the player here. I have hopped into to many tournaments at the last possible moment. If you play poker for a living, or even just care about doing the thing that is most profitable, then you absolutely should be exploiting this +EV hack. However, I think it’s important to consider this situation from the perspective of the recreational player who had been battling all day and had gone on dinner break pretty close to the bubble. That player returned to find themself on a table with three seats filled by three players with starting stacks and considerably further from the money.
It’s also noteworthy that there is an inherent advantage to being a short stack. It is easier to realize your equity when short and the fewer chips that you have, the more valuable each one is. You can re-steal a wide range, but your opponents cannot call off a similar range because they have to worry about the bigger stacks acting behind them. Essentially, the short-stack steals fold equity from the other stacks. This is why cash games don’t permit players to buy in super-shallow, yet in tournaments with a big blind ante structure, we allow it.
Middle-Ground
A middle-ground must be found. The advantages of late registration up to a point are negligible and, in the case of winning players, offset by their playing edge in the early stages being forfeited. We must figure out what is fair (or at least fairer) because we have gone way past the point of what should be acceptable.
Recreational players who show up on time because they love to play must make their voices heard about how particularly unfair it is to them. Professional players who care about the longterm health of the game need to speak up too, even if it is to their own short term detriment. It will ultimately fall on organizers to figure out a reasonable compromise so they need to hear a consistent message.
At Unibet Poker, where I am a brand ambassador, we had our reckoning on this subject two years ago when we overhauled our nightly schedule. Myself and Dara O’Kearney were asked to consult on what would be best practices going forward and our solution was grounded in some interesting statistics.
The Awkward Stack
The deeper the stacks, the bigger the edge for a winning player. A pro without a particular specialization will typically win more against an amateur at 200 big blinds than they will at 100, more at 100 than at 50 and so on. However, and this part is crucial, there is one exception as stacks between 20 and 30 big blinds are actually less profitable than stacks of between 10 and 20.
The reason for this is function of the game itself and how certain stacks can be leveraged. Shorter stacks can re-steal against you and you have to fold a lot of hands. Versus deeper stacks, the risk to reward ratio of re-shoving is awkwardly high while making a standard 3bet puts you in a tough spot against 4bets as you can’t call wide and will often have to fold, having put in a big chunk of your stack.
At the time, most of our games at Unibet allowed late registration up to the point where a player was buying 20 big blinds. That wasn’t terrible but we felt like it could and should be deeper. By that point, usually 40-45% of the field were eliminated and, with our blind level lengths and structure, that meant an instant 18% print for latecomers. So, it occurred to Dara and I, why not punish the max-late-regger by forcing them to play 25-30 big blinds, the least profitable stack. Fewer players having been eliminated would significantly reduce the late-registration ICM-bump and the ‘awkward stack’ factor would mitigate the edge even further. It seemed like a good compromise.
Standardization
The Poker TDA (Tournament Directors Association) have done a wonderful job over the years at standardizing rules and procedures within the poker industry. Founded and helmed by Matt Savage, it has had a hugely positive impact on the game. Not every poker room or tournament follows the TDA rules but, for those who do, it is both a badge of honour and a promise to players that a lot of thought has gone into making the game fair and equitable to all.
Structures are generally outside the remit of the TDA because those are the novel elements that are best suited to individual organizers. Should the clock be fast or show? Should players start with 100 big blinds or 300? Should levels be skipped or should there be repeat levels? It is reasonable for all of these things to be in the domain of the organizer. However, I think that there badly needs to be some standardization on the now burning issue of late registration.
Enough is enough for what was initially conceived as a courtesy to people caught in traffic or regulars who needed more time to convince others regulars that they were worth a spin. This option has incrementally morphed into a glaring and nefarious exploit. We must deprive edge-seeking players of the opportunity to snipe large amounts of instant EV. We must do better to protect recreational players, the lifeblood of our game, who want to spend the day actually playing cards.
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