Recently, a thread in Poker Discussion called for PocketFives.com members to submit questions for a member Full Tilt Poker’s staff. In response, site representative ftpdoug milled through the thread and selected several to be answered. Accordingly, this article contains responses to your submitted questions about the world’s second largest online poker site. Rush Poker, the 15th Full Tilt Online Poker Series (FTOPS), tournament structures at the USA-friendly room, and more will be brought into light.
PocketFives.com Member: Talk about the popularity of Rush Poker. Is it meeting your expectations?ftpdoug: Rush Poker is blowing away our original expectations. We were pretty sure that we had something good on our hands since we were all having so much fun testing it, but you never really know for sure until it's out in the wild. We’re still playing around with exactly which games and stakes to offer, so if you have any burning suggestions for which Rush game to spread next, we’re listening.
PocketFives.com Member: Talk about the attendance in the ongoing FTOPS. What are your expectations for the Main Event?
ftpdoug: Attendance is good; there are no complaints from us. We've been competing a bit with Valentine's Day and the Olympics, but overall the series is doing great. I expect 5,000 players for the Main Event.
PocketFives.com Member: We've heard that ftpdoug is actually not an individual.
ftpdoug: I can confirm that I am an individual. Nobody else posts as me. If there were, I'd probably be much better at responding to PMs and e-mails.
PocketFives.com Member: Are you guys ever going to step up and do a better job with customer support, such as faster e-mail response time?
ftpdoug: Yes. I'm not in customer support, but I believe that over the past couple of months, there has been real progress in e-mail response time. We expect things to keep getting better.
PocketFives.com Member: Can you share any information about the new rewards program?
ftpdoug: Nope.
PocketFives.com Member: Is Full Tilt Poker going to introduce a hide player feature?
ftpdoug: Yep.
PocketFives.com Member: Are there any plans to run another Take 2 promotion?ftpdoug: I'd say it's pretty likely. It's been a popular one. I don't know that we have one on the schedule yet, though.
PocketFives.com Member: Is there any chance you want to throw a Rush Poker Bonus my way?
ftpdoug: I do, yes. Ask me again in a few days.
PocketFives.com Member: Do you guys ever read the forums and seriously consider what people beg and plead for?
ftpdoug: We read the forums all of the time. In fact, many of the features we roll out are taken directly from forum feedback. Synchronized Breaks are a great example of this. That was straight from the forums and into the game.
PocketFives.com Member: When you get moved from one table to another, the old window should close.
ftpdoug: The way that table moves work will be changing entirely in the next release, which should address this and other table move issues.
PocketFives.com Member: Why can’t there be double guarantees all of the time with one-hour late registration?
ftpdoug: If there were double guarantees all of the time, wouldn't they just be guarantees? Or would it be exponential every week? Sounds expensive.
To answer seriously, we are always looking to raise our guarantees and once we work out a couple of issues with late registration, we'll very likely be changing late registration to last a full hour for all guarantees.
PocketFives.com Member: You need to sync all MTT breaks at 55 past the hour even if the tournament has just started. It really sucks to have nine tournaments going, with eight of them going to break and one of them not on break for an hour.
ftpdoug: We had this debate when we designed the feature. On the one hand, I agree that it's annoying as a multi-tabling MTT player to have just one tournament not go on break. On the other hand, a large percentage of tournament players only ever single-table and it's also pretty annoying to go on break one or two minutes after the only tournament you're playing in starts. So, we found what we consider to be a reasonable compromise. For now, I'd recommend not registering for tournaments that start so close to a break. In the future, though, we'll probably play with the late registration on those tournaments so they are still registering after the break and then you can take your break and still play.
PocketFives.com Member: Why do so many of the FTOPS events start so late?ftpdoug: It's always late somewhere is the short answer. The long answer has to do with people who work on the West Coast of the United States versus people who are asleep in Europe. It's impossible to get a single start time that works for everyone, so we have two different times on most days to make sure we're letting most players play in at least half of the events. I know that it sucks when the event you most want to play is in the wrong time slot and we try to mix up a number of events from FTOPS to FTOPS, but some of them are pretty well stuck either in the late slot or early slot for popularity reasons. We may shake things up a bit more in the next FTOPS, which will make more people happy or make more people hate me. Probably both.
PocketFives.com Member: Full Tilt has so many great tournaments at basically every buy-in level. Why is the structure of these tournaments so great for the first three or four hours and then goes to shit when it really should be best, the final few tables and final table?
ftpdoug: It's definitely impossible to make everyone happy when it comes to structures. One thing I really like about our structures these days is that the level time increases as the tournament goes on. Usually, it’s from 10 minutes to 12 to 15 or 12 to 15 to 20. If you have a few examples of tournaments that are really suffering (ones that are supposed to play deep throughout, not the smaller buy-in tournaments that most players prefer to have finish in a reasonable number of hours), then I can take a look and see if any improvements can be made.
As I was curious, I just now took a look at the $100 tournament that starts at 12:00 ET. Running a little over four hours with 12 players left, the average stack has 43 big blinds. By comparison, the $24 tournament that started at the same time has 41 players left and an average stack of just over 29 big blinds. Both seem reasonable to me.
Anyway, I'm not saying you're wrong, but I am saying that we've put a lot of time and effort into striking a balance between giving everyone enough play and making sure that tournaments don't last forever. There's always room for improvement, though, and if the majority of players want a tournament's structure changed, it's very likely I'll be paying attention to that and seeing what we can do.
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