Poker tournament structures: the new trend of deep stacks

A live or an online poker tourney is basically defined by its structure. The structure is what determines how long the tourney will last, how many tables will be used and whether the real action will take place early, in middle stages or at the end of it. Without a proper structure, no poker event can ever be successful.
Tournament directors are perpetually confronted with striking a balance between what the poker players want and how the tournament management sees things going down. In order for all parties to be satisfied, the director often needs to find a compromise between contradicting expectations.

Management requirements usually concern table numbers and tournament length. Players are constantly asking for bigger and bigger starting stacks. If you follow the live and online poker scene closely, you may have noticed that lately starting stack sizes have sky-rocketed in most major and minor live and online tournaments. The goal of the move was supposedly to deal the luck factor a blow and to once again allow skilled professionals to dominate events. A mild drop in live poker popularity had initially been attributed to the fact that tourney winners were much too random, and that the luck factor played a much too big role in determining the eventual winners. Since the poker public wanted to see well-known celebrities do battle at the green felt event after event and poker tour after poker tour, the decision to increase starting stack sizes was made.

This course of action didn’t quite take it into consideration though that the apparent drop in the number of participants on various poker tours may also be attributed to the proliferation of such events way beyond what anybody would’ve thought possible a mere few years ago. With that in mind, I wouldn’t be surprised if the overall player numbers were actually still on the rise despite all the negative news drummed up by the various poker tour officials.

Another question is, does the poker public really want to see only accomplished professionals at the final tables? I mean the big poker boom of 2003-2004 was due to the very fact that two no name online qualifiers were able to take down pokers most coveted prize.

Sure, players always want bigger starting stacks because it gives them the impression that they’re given more gunpowder to wage war with, but most poker tournaments cannot last for weeks and the bigger stacks need to be compensated somehow. Tourney directors most often achieve this compensation by doubling up the blinds (which in itself will negate most of the benefits of a larger starting stack) and by eliminating blinds levels which are often crucial in the big scheme of things. In response, players demand even larger starting stacks, and thus the perpetual tug of war goes on, neither party able to tip things his way.
The real question here is: does giving players bigger starting stacks make any sense at all, especially in light of the arguments brought up above? Do larger stacks really mean that the luck factor will be restrained?

Deep stacked tournaments may give players the ability to weather a bad beat or two in the early stages of the tourney (although with opponents equally well stacked, that too is somewhat doubtful), but in the later stages, the whole thing degenerates into a crapshoot.
The larger stacks offer players a safety cushion in the early stages but that doesn’t mean players won’t bleed chips away, and thus, by the middle stages of the tournament the majority of survivors will be short-stacked. This is where the crapshoot begins and it lasts pretty much to the end of the event.
Tournament experts say (and I happen to agree with that) that play belongs to the middle and late stages of a tourney. Large stacked events tend to yield extremely short final tables while regular ones produce well disputed, longer final tables. I rest my case on that.

Experienced tournament players generally agree that fish like more chips at the table. Fish are the ones who like the early action which most good tourney players consider meaningless. If we look at it from that angle, it’s obvious that deep stacked events are designed for fish. Is that necessarily a bad thing though? After all, the majority of poker players (online a well as offline) are fish, no reason to lie to ourselves about that.

At the end of the day, whether or not deep stacked is the way to go depends on several factors, among which the most important is: where in the tournament do you want the skill factor to dominate?
Keep in mind though that deep stacked events cost more for the organizers (the more intense early action does) and that fact is likely to translate in higher entry fees.