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Poker is so popular because it's like 95% luck. Lots of terrible players go on huge winning streaks and think they're the next Tom Dwan. This is discussed in Sklansky's books (and many others). The large amount of luck is very good for poker pros, because it means that bad players keep coming back.
If you play chess (or SC2) against a guy for $100 per game, and you get blown out 3 games in a row, you probably won't want to keep playing. You'll want 10-1 odds or something. Poker is different. You may feel like you're a great player and you'll keep playing against someone who is a lot better than you due to the randomness.
So Starcraft is completely unlike poker. In SC2, if you are stuck in gold league, you know you can't beat diamond players. If you're stuck at 2400 diamond you know you don't have a chance against pros. So you won't be willing to put much money into a tournament prize fund. Poker gets gamboolers because bad players think they're good. That just doesn't happen in SC2.
A better analogy is chess. There's very little luck in chess (arguably none, unless you consider playing an opening your opp happens to be unfamiliar with to be luck). There is a bit more luck in SC2, because of the fog of war you don't know what your opp is doing and they may surprise you. But still, in both games players very quickly get a clear idea of where they stand on the skill rankings. So you should expect the amount of money in poker to be about the same as the amount in chess. In other words, hardly any, unless you're Carlsen, Topalov, Anand, etc.
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One way to make people want to play tournaments more would be like they do in chess. If I pay $10 I want to at least get a few games in. If it's single elimination I may only get one game. But if you run it like a chess open tournament, where everyone plays a game every round, then at least I feel like I'm getting a good time for my $10, even though I know I have no chance of winning. These tournaments are a lot more complex to run, but they do get a lot of people willing to pay an entry fee to participate. I would be interested in a tournament like this, and I would even pay money to participate. You could offer prizes for "best bronze" etc so even the worst players may have some incentive to play and feel like they're part of the scene.
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On December 15 2010 12:59 ziggurat wrote:
Poker is so popular because it's like 95% luck. Lots of terrible players go on huge winning streaks and think they're the next Tom Dwan. This is discussed in Sklansky's books (and many others). The large amount of luck is very good for poker pros, because it means that bad players keep coming back.
If you play chess (or SC2) against a guy for $100 per game, and you get blown out 3 games in a row, you probably won't want to keep playing. You'll want 10-1 odds or something. Poker is different. You may feel like you're a great player and you'll keep playing against someone who is a lot better than you due to the randomness.
So Starcraft is completely unlike poker. In SC2, if you are stuck in gold league, you know you can't beat diamond players. If you're stuck at 2400 diamond you know you don't have a chance against pros. So you won't be willing to put much money into a tournament prize fund. Poker gets gamboolers because bad players think they're good. That just doesn't happen in SC2.
A better analogy is chess. There's very little luck in chess (arguably none, unless you consider playing an opening your opp happens to be unfamiliar with to be luck). There is a bit more luck in SC2, because of the fog of war you don't know what your opp is doing and they may surprise you. But still, in both games players very quickly get a clear idea of where they stand on the skill rankings. So you should expect the amount of money in poker to be about the same as the amount in chess. In other words, hardly any, unless you're Carlsen, Topalov, Anand, etc.
***
One way to make people want to play tournaments more would be like they do in chess. If I pay $10 I want to at least get a few games in. If it's single elimination I may only get one game. But if you run it like a chess open tournament, where everyone plays a game every round, then at least I feel like I'm getting a good time for my $10, even though I know I have no chance of winning. These tournaments are a lot more complex to run, but they do get a lot of people willing to pay an entry fee to participate. I would be interested in a tournament like this, and I would even pay money to participate. You could offer prizes for "best bronze" etc so even the worst players may have some incentive to play and feel like they're part of the scene.
Great points and analogies. Like you, I think that the concept of poker tournaments cannot be entirely transplanted into the Sc2 scene.
But what if there are tournaments catered to all skill levels? For example a diamond 2.5 k will only play against other diamond 2.3-2.7k players.
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I think this idea could definately work, but it would have to be structured more like a chess tournament, 7 round swiss or whatever, instead of knockout...
But again, the problem falls back to the issue that in a chess tournament, people pay to enter at the lower levels to get experience playing against higher people, get the chance to possibly win some games, and get the chance to increase their rating against people for the whole 7 games. For the people not in contention for the prizes, it's mostly about getting to play in a serious setting.
For Starcraft 2 players however, there's nothing really gained from doing this. You don't get any ladder points from playing in a tournament (maybe changed if Blizzard introduced a tournament system). You can play against higher level players without a tournament if you wanted (and I suppose had the social skills too). And there is no ability to have a 'Under XX rating' prize pool since in-game SC2 ratings are so inaccurate compared to chess ratings.
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Because MLG added SC2 to its circuit towards the end of the year, there will be a lot more MLG tournaments next year for the best to compete in, and larger prize pools for them will help draw them out. However, the accessibility of small online tournaments in spare time still will roll in a little extra dough for some pro players.
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Money for organizing tournament can come from 3 sources in my opinion.
1. Sponsor (like SteelSeries Tournament, and so on)
2. Player or community (Like OP suggest, a buy-in tournament or gosucup)
3. Investor (like Kespa or may be GSL)
Investor is not exactly similar to sponsor type. Investor do the tournament for purpose of direct profit such as what GOMTV is doing. While sponsor is likely to aim for marketing purpose.
If we want to inject money in to the industry (SC2 tournament). The best way should be from sponsor and investor because the amount of money from player and community will be hard to compare with what those sponsor.
There is not much we can do. The game it self has to be popular enough to attract the large audience in order to have big investor and sponsor.
Anyway, I encourage SC community to try the buy in tournament and see what happen. it might grow big, who know...
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On December 15 2010 13:10 Bladefury wrote:
Great points and analogies. Like you, I think that the concept of poker tournaments cannot be entirely transplanted into the Sc2 scene.
But what if there are tournaments catered to all skill levels? For example a diamond 2.5 k will only play against other diamond 2.3-2.7k players.
This could work. The only problem I see is that if you have, say, a platinum league tourney with a decent prize fund, there will be some unscrupulous players who start new accounts or dump ratings points to get into the tournament. This happens a bit in chess too (eg players drop from 2000 to 1500 to win the "best 1400-1600" prize), but it's much easier to do in an anonymous online universe.
I'm not saying it's a bad idea, but if the goal is to get non-expert players to put in their money to play, then you need those players to feel that the tournaments are fair. I could see this being tough to police.
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I agree with the guy above me, Ziggurat (props to you for having an awesome username btw).
You already kind of addressed this point at the bottom of the OP, but I think it deserves more elaboration because it's one of the fundamental problems with the idea.
The reason that SC2 tournaments can't operate like poker tournaments is because of the lack of variance. Chess is the best analogy we can use. If I'm a good amateur chess player, I will still lose 100-0 if I play a grandmaster. Idra would beat any Platinum player in SC2 100-0, or at least 98-2. But if an amateur poker player like me plays Phil Ivey in heads up sit'n'gos, I could probably win up to 25% of the games (depending on the structure).
This is what funds the poker economy. Amateurs love to play big poker tournaments because they know that even if they aren't the most skilled player, basically any donk with good cards and good luck can make a deep run. But in SC2 this is not the case. As an amateur SC2 player, I know that I am dead as soon as I face a pro in a tournament. I can't beat the pro, and unlike in poker, I can't rely on someone else knocking him out of the tournament for me early on.
To take an example, lets say we have a 500 man SC2 tournament with 10 pros and 490 amateurs. We run this tournament 100 times, and what happens? A pro will win every single time. In fact, most likely the top 4 or even the top 8 will be the exact same people in almost every tournament. But if you ran a poker tournament like this, a pro would win less than 10% of the time, and the top 8 would contain a huge variety of players from tournament to tournament.
This makes SC2 great for pros because the best player almost always wins. Unfortunately it also removes the incentive for amateurs to "try their luck". I'm not gonna spend $10 on a 64-man SC2 tournament unless I know that I'm one of the 4 best players in the tournament. Furthermore, if even one known pro signs up then my ROI is as good as dead. Weaker players will not keep throwing their money at tournaments they know they can't win, so eventually they will stop paying and just go play for free (unlike poker, laddering allows you to play the game without spending money).
TL DR: the only reason the poker economy is able to exist is because of variance. Since there is no variance in SC2, this tournament model cannot be sustained in the long-term.
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On December 15 2010 13:23 LionsFist wrote:
I think this idea could definately work, but it would have to be structured more like a chess tournament, 7 round swiss or whatever, instead of knockout...
But again, the problem falls back to the issue that in a chess tournament, people pay to enter at the lower levels to get experience playing against higher people, get the chance to possibly win some games, and get the chance to increase their rating against people for the whole 7 games. For the people not in contention for the prizes, it's mostly about getting to play in a serious setting.
For Starcraft 2 players however, there's nothing really gained from doing this. You don't get any ladder points from playing in a tournament (maybe changed if Blizzard introduced a tournament system). You can play against higher level players without a tournament if you wanted (and I suppose had the social skills too). And there is no ability to have a 'Under XX rating' prize pool since in-game SC2 ratings are so inaccurate compared to chess ratings.
This is a good point. In chess you can play online too, but no one really cares about your "icc" rating. People want to get decent ratings with FIDE, or the USCF, or whatever the association is in your region, and you can only get that by playing live games. Starcraft, by contrast, most people only play online.
Maybe as the game matures there will be some kind of official ratings system that has more meaning than bnet points.
Still, there might be some way to get people interested in online swiss-style tournaments. If people start offering them for, say, $2 to play an 8 game tournament, players might get used to the idea of paying a nominal amount for tournaments. I would be happy to do this, as long as paying the money wasn't a hassle (i.e. it needs to be simple). Especially if the tournament was well organized and well-run, it would be a lot of fun and well worth a small amount of money.
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On December 15 2010 13:35 FuRong wrote:
The reason that SC2 tournaments can't operate like poker tournaments is because of the lack of variance. Chess is the best analogy we can use. If I'm a good amateur chess player, I will still lose 100-0 if I play a grandmaster. Idra would beat any Platinum player in SC2 100-0, or at least 98-2. But if an amateur poker player like me plays Phil Ivey in heads up sit'n'gos, I could probably win up to 25% of the games (depending on the structure).
This is exactly what I was trying to say. And btw I think you would beat Ivey more like 40% if you play halfway decent (however if you played repeatedly he'd figure your play out a lot better than you'd figure out his, so maybe 25% is more accurate after a lot of hands).
One other thought about this is that it would be really cool to play bo3's in a tournament. Have you ever lost to a cheesy all-in and said "fuck I would like a rematch against this fucker"? If each match in a tournament was a best of 3, you would get your rematches. This would be something that I think would appeal to a lot of players.
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As a runner of local chess tournaments, I can tell you now that collecting an average ($10) amount of money from someone is a lot easier than collecting a small($2-3) sum of money 
As for it being online, probably a lot easier through instant paypal transfers and the like, but there will always be hassle.
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On December 15 2010 13:34 ziggurat wrote:Show nested quote +On December 15 2010 13:10 Bladefury wrote:
Great points and analogies. Like you, I think that the concept of poker tournaments cannot be entirely transplanted into the Sc2 scene.
But what if there are tournaments catered to all skill levels? For example a diamond 2.5 k will only play against other diamond 2.3-2.7k players.
This could work. The only problem I see is that if you have, say, a platinum league tourney with a decent prize fund, there will be some unscrupulous players who start new accounts or dump ratings points to get into the tournament. This happens a bit in chess too (eg players drop from 2000 to 1500 to win the "best 1400-1600" prize), but it's much easier to do in an anonymous online universe. I'm not saying it's a bad idea, but if the goal is to get non-expert players to put in their money to play, then you need those players to feel that the tournaments are fair. I could see this being tough to police.
You'd have to make the pay structure heavily incentivize staying at your true level. So "best <1600" prize might be your buy-in back, and then "best 1600-1800" might be double that, or something.
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ZIGGURAT, STOP.
Seriously, dude, if you want to compare Starcraft 2 and poker, that's 100%. If you want to argue that you can't compare them, that's 100% fine. But for you to make incredibly idiotic statements like
And btw I think you would beat Ivey more like 40% if you play halfway decent (however if you played repeatedly he'd figure your play out a lot better than you'd figure out his, so maybe 25% is more accurate after a lot of hands).
Poker is so popular because it's like 95% luck.
makes me rage, as someone who has a very intimate understanding of the game of poker, ESPECIALLY when you claim to have read ANY book relating to poker.
NO professional will tell you that poker is even remotely luck-based. There is NO luck in long-term poker earnings, only odds and statistics. "Luck" is an illusion created by looking at a small sample size of a large number of hands. A player who gets AA dealt to them three times in a row is just as likely to have 27off dealt three times in a row as well.
On another note, I understand that Starcraft 2 has a much much smaller "luck" element involved in it than Poker, in that skill will dictate the winner of any single SC2 match much more often than any single poker match, but I believe that this is completely irrelevant to my argument. In no point in me talking about bringing more money into the SC2 scene via tournaments am I suggesting that "luck" need be a necessary element.
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the only reason i would bother paying is if i had a chance of making back what i paid, which i wouldn't so no, i probably wouldn't, especially when there are free tournaments all over the place.
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On December 15 2010 15:16 suicideMARE wrote:
the only reason i would bother paying is if i had a chance of making back what i paid, which i wouldn't so no, i probably wouldn't, especially when there are free tournaments all over the place.
would you rather go up against members of ROOT, liquid and others for a chance at winning
or pay and get a shot at winning against some 2300pts ranked dude?
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On December 15 2010 15:42 megagoten wrote:Show nested quote +On December 15 2010 15:16 suicideMARE wrote:
the only reason i would bother paying is if i had a chance of making back what i paid, which i wouldn't so no, i probably wouldn't, especially when there are free tournaments all over the place. would you rather go up against members of ROOT, liquid and others for a chance at winning or pay and get a shot at winning against some 2300pts ranked dude?
The latter for me. You can already face the pros for free in current tournaments.
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Seriously. And the pay structure would pay, say, the top 25 or 40% of finishers, not JUST first or JUST first/second place. With entry fees, the prize pool would be large enough so that a decent player has a chance at winning in a tournament. If there was an extremely talented player in your tourney, it's not like you have zero chance at getting "in the money", so to speak.
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I think the problem might be that a high ranked player has enough time on his hands to participate in all these tournaments, given the miracle of the internet. (Ability to play in a tournament regardless of location, thus summing it to a time problem)
A poker player has to physically be there for quite some time in order to actually win money.
However a pro-starcraft player has the time on his hands in between competing for big tournaments to do quite a few of the small ones, especially those middle tier semi-pro players like a lot of the foreigners you have mentioned in the tournies you used as examples.
For instance, Idra has enough time to stream, because he isn't constantly playing for the GSL, thus he has enough time to play in small tournaments if he wanted to. (He doesn't not because of time but more keeping his name out of those small fields and only attached to big gaming things)
There should be some restriction thus:
players are only allowed to buy into a certain amount of tournaments at a time.
Thus preventing pros who want to go for high amounts of money in the big tournies from picking up small amounts of cash on the side, because in reality they honestly do have enough time to do this.
I do like how a pay structure would actually make it worthwhile for small time players to play in tournaments and actually win something, but a lot of players won't buy into another tournament if they lose money in the first one.
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On December 15 2010 16:08 Steven.Bonnell.II wrote:
Seriously. And the pay structure would pay, say, the top 25 or 40% of finishers, not JUST first or JUST first/second place. With entry fees, the prize pool would be large enough so that a decent player has a chance at winning in a tournament. If there was an extremely talented player in your tourney, it's not like you have zero chance at getting "in the money", so to speak.
Good point. Here is my thought:
A rather high level player that is a skill notch below the pros has the following options:
1. Enter a high stakes tournament with the risk of meeting a pro in the beginning stages and getting knocked out, or the chance to finish in the lower portion of the top 25 and win a small portion of the large prize pool. If the top pros are playing in these tournaments, chances of finishing in the top 4 and winning a significant portion of the prize pool is slim.
or
2. Enter a lower stakes tournament and dominate, hence winning a big portion of the smaller prize pool on a more consistent basis.
These two options may have the same expected value of winnings, but I wonder how people will make decisions in situations like that.
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As a mediocre hold'em player who has been playing low stakes on Full Tilt since it had less than 1000 active players and only a few pros, and as a mediocre SC2 player (~1450 diamond) but longtime SC player dating back late 90's early 2000's, I simply LOVE this idea.
I literally agree with every single point made in this thread and strongly encourage it. I watch your stream frequently, love your play style, it's very similar to mine (general strategy-wise that is, your APM, micro, and macro all are farrrr superior to mine), and I have learned alot from you. Thanks for doin what you do lol
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I agree with Ziggurat. I play Magic: The Gathering tournaments every week, and until I got good enough to consistently place highly, one of the biggest incentives was that for my seven bucks, I got to play close to four hours of Magic, win or lose. This also allows for players to play in larger tournaments, to see well they can do (and to an up-and-comer, it looks better to go 4-4 one tournament, 5-3 the next than get knocked out Round 1 then knocked out Round 2). If you want to get average/fairly good players playing tournaments (and not the TL version of fairly good), Swiss format is a brilliant idea.
The "best bronze" is a great idea, too. It doesn't have to be a big prize, but as a Silver SC2 player I know that winning my entry fee back for doing the best out of the players in my league (even if there's only like, 9 in a 256-man tournament) would be pretty cool.
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EPT
