[bav]

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Im not sure if you are familiar with the system i developed (PTES) and when i went back and recrunched the numbers the 2 hour M comes out like this.

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I was not familiar with it, but a quick Google and now I am. Looks remarkably like Snyder's approach, and Herrington's, and, well... just about everybody else who has ever given any thought to tourney structures. My own "simple formulaic evaluation" I've used over the years is to look at when the blinds+antes per round will reach the original buy-in amount, and at what point the blinds will hit 5% of the sum total of chips in play given a "normal" sized field. I like Snyder's approach pretty well, also, but it's a bit more time consuming to compute.

One thing I dislike about all of these "formulas" is it tends to generate a single number which tries to tell all, and that doesn't always tell the story. Some tourneys are really bad about starting out with a nice structure, and then going insane in the later stages with the blinds doubling (or more) each and every round. Some tourneys double the blinds early on each round, and then slack off once the blinds reach a reasonable size (25/50, 50/100, 100/200, 200/400 is a pretty common start, but then most tourneys have mercy and head into 1.5x sorta blind increases each round instead of 2x, but some are more merciful than others).

So I like graphs, myself. MUCH easier to get the whole picture. Long as you're punching in most of the blind structure to compute Snyder's patience factor, might as well just graph it, too.