In December, a Party Poker NJ representative requested the users of Two Plus Two Forums to give their feedback on its $50 Guaranteed tournament. Player feedback revealed that the event can become more popular if it began earlier and had a slightly modified structure.
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Last Monday, Party Poker NJ announced that it has made some changes to the $50k tournament. According to these changes, the tournament will begin at 5:00 p.m. with a guaranteed first-place prize of $10k and a better blind structure.
But the better blind structure has converted the $50k event into a semi-turbo, deep-stacked tournament. Robert DellaFave, a poker journalist, says in his report on OnlinePokerReport.com: “Instead of fusing or eliminating the early levels when players are 500 big blinds deep, several critical mid-tournament blind levels were eradicated altogether. Abiding by this structure, New Jersey’s biggest weekly tournament would more closely resemble a virtual shove fest than one in which skillful pre and post-flop play was rewarded.”
As soon as Party Poker NJ made these announcements, responses began pouring in at Two Plus Two Forums. User isuxatpokerbad said that removing 250/500, 600/1200 and others from the tournament is a tragedy as “that makes these blind jumps way too big in a crucial stage of the tournament.” Agreeing with the above opinion, user Gags30 said that the structure was too slow and could have been fixed without getting rid of levels later during the tournament.
Four days before Party Poker was scheduled to implement these changes, a Party Poker representative announced that the online poker room has made a second change to the tournament structure. According to these changes, the mid-blind levels would be re-introduced and a number of pre-ante blind levels were merged into a 25/50 level. Players were delighted with these new changes.
After the changes were implemented, as many as 378 players took part in the $50k event, which is 42 percent more than the field of the last $50k event. The event came to an end at 3:04 a.m. and the first-place prize of $13,300 was given away to the champion. The runner-up of the event got a prize of $9,355. In fact, prizes were awarded to around 19 percent of the player field, which some players feel is being too generous.
This clearly indicates that Party Poker NJ’s upgrades, based entirely on player feedback, were very successful without the site having to spend any money on it.
