Why haven't buyins grown?

Rusty Nails · #1 03-09-2007, 01:02 PM

Although it doesn't affect me I'm curious why there aren't bigger buyins available online. Many live events are between $500-1000 (and the big events 5 fiqures), yet the 'bigger' regular online events are $100-200.

Pokerstars has been great in the past about giving the players what they want. Is there not a demand for higher buyins among the top players?

kutuz_off · #2 03-09-2007, 01:05 PM

Relatively recent developments - $300 buyin tournaments on Stars on Wed and Sat, $200+r/a, $300 6-handed on FullTilt, $1000 mondays on FTP, $1000 weekly qualifiers on UB and FTP, monthly $500 and quarterly $1000 Million Guaranteed on Stars.

KneeCo · #3 03-09-2007, 01:11 PM

buyins are going up.

look at WCOOP this year for starters, the 4 NLHE 215s on Sundays on stars (1 rebuy), the quarterly 1k, the full tilt 1k, ... .

Two of the reasons that live buyins are always bigger is the need to charge more rake and the limited number of tournaments which can be hosted. Online poker are a different medium, which changes a lot.

Pokerstars doesn't want people going busto on weekly 1k mtts.

The difficulty to deposit + seemingly silly deposit limits on stars )how can they have a 1k buyin tournament and not let people deposit 1k at a time?) will slow the progress.

augie_ · #4 03-09-2007, 01:07 PM

isn't there like a nightly 1k tournament on full tilt?

octoinky · #5 03-09-2007, 01:20 PM

A lot of people also play out of bankroll online. Online poker sites are based on returning customers a lot, and a few moderate players quickly blowing it all on a few gigantic tournaments may not be inclined to quickly redeposit that money. Blowing a couple hundred on the sunday million, a lot more people can (and apparently do) handle, and keep returning.

Of course, this is why higher buyins are often fed by satellites as well, however I dont think a good solution is to flood the site with more high buyin/heavy satellite tournaments and blow half the users bankrolls.

Rusty Nails · #6 03-09-2007, 01:43 PM

PS now spreads 200/400NL and 1000/2000 limit so I don't think the site is worried about players going busto. Likewise deposit restrictions shouldn't restrict the top players from looking for bigger buyins.

Buyins are increasing but not nearly as quickly as ring games. And there is a huge difference between live buyins and online buyins. Is there no demand for weekly 1-5k events?

Ontario_Tory · #7 03-09-2007, 01:51 PM

[ QUOTE ]
PS now spreads 200/400NL and 1000/2000 limit so I don't think the site is worried about players going busto. Likewise deposit restrictions shouldn't restrict the top players from looking for bigger buyins.

Buyins are increasing but not nearly as quickly as ring games. And there is a huge difference between live buyins and online buyins. Is there no demand for weekly 1-5k events?

[/ QUOTE ]

I think you'll see super-high-buyin SnG's first.

What's the largest out there? On Stars they have 5k HU sng's, as well as what - 1k STTs?

shaundeeb · #8 03-09-2007, 01:57 PM

party used to have the high buyin steps that ran from time to time.

adanthar · #9 03-09-2007, 02:01 PM

tbh, I would really rather buyins not grow, or grow very slowly.

the reasons for this are that 1)barely anyone on the Internet is really rolled for full time donkaments as is, 2)every time a huge MTT goes up tons of money is taken out of the poker economy in sats for it/rake, and 3)concentrating hundreds of buyins in the hands of one person at a time is not really good for poker, either.

$200 MTT's are fine. Make all the weeklies $500-1K and you've just made thousands of people busto.

tailspin4540 · #10 03-10-2007, 08:19 AM

[ QUOTE ]
Although it doesn't affect me I'm curious why there aren't bigger buyins available online. Many live events are between $500-1000 (and the big events 5 fiqures), yet the 'bigger' regular online events are $100-200.

Pokerstars has been great in the past about giving the players what they want. Is there not a demand for higher buyins among the top players?

[/ QUOTE ]

I don't think there is, honestly.

My thinking is sort of a version of "why the big cash players don't play a lot of tournaments" ROI argument. Consider: For $1000, an American player can buy into all five available Sunday majors (Stars, FT, UB, Absolute, Bodog). Is it really worth that much more to toss all of that money into the Full Tilt $1000 and face a smaller field with not nearly as many bad players?

Also, a lot of the guys here don't seem to play that many >$100 tourneys besides the Stuper, Full Tilt's $150 and the big Sunday tourneys. Even the high-volume players in this forum are high-volume at lower buyins.

Also for the reasons Adanthar stated. People aren't rolled for that much, and $1000 isn't a small amount of money.

(The WCOOP doesn't really count because it's only once a year. And rebuys are a different beast, though I'm looking at Stars right now and the last two $100r's only got 144 and 140 runners.)