The BBT Scoring: FAR from Perfect

A lot of opinions have been heard from people about the BBT scoring, even one very questionable position that the scoring was "perfect."

First of all, a "perfect" system is impossible, because a perfect system would make everyone who might play in the series happy, and OBVIOUSLY everyone wasn't happy. If your definition of "perfect" is INCREDIBLY low, for example "A few more people played in a few more blogger tournaments," then I guess you could call the system "perfect."

This is ABSOLUTELY NOT a dig at the people that did A TON of HARD WORK for NO BENEFIT to themselves by putting this series together. This is merely my feelings about the system and how that system could be made so that more people might enjoy it if the series were to continue.

I DID NOT ACTIVELY PARTICIPATE in the BBT Tournament Series. I didn't exactly avoid the tournaments, but knowing they were going on made me not want to play in them.

Why didn't I want to play in the series? Because I knew I wouldn't be able to play in more than 30 of them. It would be impossible for me to play in 30 tournaments in a 60 day span. And if you didn't play in at least 30 tournaments, there's almost no way you could compete for the prizes. Let me say that again, because it's the point I'm trying to make. If you weren't willing to play a tournament at least half the days in a two month time span, you would not have a reasonable chance to win one of the prizes. One of the tournaments even required you to travel to Las Vegas to play!

Now this isn't as bad as it sounds, because there was no extra fee for the additional prizes, so there was no penalty for playing a few of them once or twice for fun. The vast majority of the players in the series played so few events that they obviously weren't interested in competing for the main prizes. But if you were making a commitment to try and win, YOU WERE MAKING A SERIOUS COMMITMENT OF TIME, and just for a chance of a final prize and a free $33 tournament entry.

How many people played in the BBT series? Overall there were 316 different contestants. How many played enough to seriously contend for the prizes? Well, that depends on how many you needed to play to win. Only 15 people played in 30 or more events which is the absolute bare minimum you could play to have a dream of scoring enough points to compete. Only 7 players played 33 or more, enough for serious contention. About 3% of the people who played the series played enough events to give themselves a good chance to win.

There is a way to improve the scoring system so that you don't have to give up half the nights in a two month span to have a chance. Lots of people played in lots of events, certainly enough that they should have had a chance to compete. 45 people played 20 or more events. 57 people played 15 or more. 75 played in 10 or more.

If you took the top 20 scores for each player and threw out the results of any below their top 20, not only would more people have had a chance to compete, more people would have had incentive to play more events. Those that played between 10 and 20 events (30 people!) might have been more willing to play in 1-9 more events to have a chance at the prizes.

There would still be plenty of incentive to play more than 20 events, to try and improve your overall score by moving a lower result out of your top 20. But it wouldn't penalize those people who were only able to play 20-25 events. The person who played in all 39 events would still have given himself the best chance to win the top prize, but it wouldn't have made it THE ONLY WAY TO WIN IT.

I know that the World Series of Poker counts points from every single event in its player of the year standings, and that's probably what the BBT creators were trying to emulate. but the WSOP POY is for Professional Poker Players. If they were trying to attract only professional online players to the BBT, this would be a good system. If they were trying to get as many bloggers (who might have outside lives and jobs) as they could to play and compete, they could have done better.