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UKOPS and beyond
Hi All,
Our 15 day UKOPS festival is over and what a festival it was. We ran in excess of 100 UKOPS events and guaranteed over £500,000. There was some inevitable overlay in the Super UKOPS events but it was good to see 2000+ runner tournaments runnng on the site.
On the back of UKOPS we are looking at revamping the Tournament schedule on the site. Not just for the nightly main event but for the other tournaments in the schedule. I have ideas about what we can do but I wanted to open it to the guys that are going to play it.
Is there a tournament during UKOPS you particularly liked?
What kind of buy in do you think is right?
Is there a spot for a decent guaranteed Omaha tournament?
Are turbos more appealing than deepstacks?
What satellites worked for you?
As I say I am working on some of my own ideas and of course we have a wealth of stats to help make decisions but please let us know what you thought and what you want to see. I won't pretend there is going to be a £25k guaranteed event with an £11 buy in every week, there isn't. But lets discuss some ideas here.
Thanks
Sam
Comments
Is there a tournament during UKOPS you particularly liked? What kind of buy in do you think is right? Is there a spot for a decent guaranteed Omaha tournament? Are turbos more appealing than deepstacks? What satellites worked for you?
I particularly liked the £22 speeds at 9.
I would like to see a monthly higher stakes tourny with lots of qualifiers.
Need mix of turbos/deepstacks, but perhaps not enough turbos at present-and the Tues Main should be a £22 or £33
At the risk of upsetting the Ploppers, forget high stakes Omaha.
The best sats are the 3/6 pm semis-the 7 15 could start earlier
Hope that helps
I particularly liked the free seats addition to the freeroll program (for people that play daily), and also the many sats to the larger events. I don't understand the daily £1k freeroll, ok £100 up top is nice, buts whats with the pence payouts?
The best sats are the ones where you guarantee more seats which attract more players, a schedule advertising them would be useful, as finding them / making time for them can be tricky.
IMO, the prize pools for Omaha related games are too top heavy, since these games have a lot of variance.
Presumably, with the holdem games very well catered for (and have deffo wetted my appetite to play larger buyin holdem Ts), the question is: is it worth it to add a weekly / monthly PLO or PL08 event?
there are players who want to play these, but you have to stick you neck out alittle to see if it will work.
how about having 1 omaha main and mini event per month and on that same day replace of few of the other most popular MTTs with a couple more PLo and PL08s. it can be called the omaha day.
The only part of omaha i'd not recommend is PL08 bounty hunters because of frequent split pots .
The sort of overlay given out through both design and mistakes was absurd and cannot be anything other than damaging to the site's economy and long term to the players, as both are interwoven.
You said the overlay was 'inevitable' for the Super Bounty Hunters. So this was planned then? Because I asked this when they were announced, if it was some sort of shadow promotion and I never received a conclusive answer as I recall. Now obviously I will never and should never see the data of the benefits from this, maybe those free tenner entries will result in hundreds of new loyal customers. But when people are freely talking on the tables about opening a second account for the free entry, I have my doubts. In my opinion, planned overlay is never anything but harmful for a site long term, and the players may think 'lovely, free value' but we all eventually foot the bill, from the absence of promotions which could have happened to rake back changes to many other things.
Moving to another matter, nothing puts off new and existing players like mistakes and technical problems. It was flagged when the Super BHers were announced from long term regular players that they had doubts about the software/servers being able to handle those sorts of numbers. These concerns were waved off. The night of the first Super, the vast majority of players experienced huge lag. Now this was fixed for the remaining ones and we were grateful, but it seems every time a new element is brought in the attitude is 'run it live, then see what doesn't work then fix it.' Nothing turns off players more than this, you only get to make a first impression once after all. And on a night with a planned overlay MTT whose sole benefit by design from what I see is to attract new players, first impressions matter.
Some of the mistakes were boggling in my opinion. No site should just give away two thousand pounds by an input error. But that happened. There shouldn't be satellites which are set up to have the seats start from 10th, but that happened and while Sky did the very correct thing in refunding everyone, it's all reactionary instead of proactionary or getting it right first time. Yes people make mistakes but the amount made here to me are just unacceptable. The lobbies and service messages are littered with spelling mistakes, old messages and the like. It makes the site look utterly bush league, and since a major benefit of festivals like UKOPS is to attract new players, these things matter. The online poker market is pretty busy, it's tough enough if you are completely on your game, making mistakes which are so avoidable is needlessly wounding your own chances.
On the plus side I finally saw the new SkyPoker advert a couple of days ago. I mean, I thought it was part of the preceeding SkyVegas one for a good time before I saw the snake but at least I finally saw it. I still think this should be appearing on other formats rather than television. SkyPoker marketing and marketing for UKOPS should be promoted on Twitter, Facebook, appear in YouTube and Twitch adverts, all the places someone goes to when they have hours of spare time and are already in front of a computer. But that's just me.
Well to finish on a high note, a lot of the festival worked really well with a lot to build on in the future. And please please please for the countless time, whoever sets up MTT lobbies and games, double check your work. Then double check it again. So much can be avoided.
I personally like the nightly main schedule but agree with what phillip said maybe make the Tuesday main a higher BI, i enjoy playing PLO both small stakes cash and mtt but contrary to what some people think PLO is never going to get too poplurer no matter how much a site promotes it NL just works so much better but would like to see a once as mouth PLO main.
There is a £11 Turbo that runs on a Tuesday at around 10pm and seems to do well, not sure why something similar can't be done most nights.
Nice rant TommyD! Must admit, there are lots of spelling (and other) mistakes in the lobbies which should easily be able to be corrected / cut-out.
The decision to include main event seats in the prize fund of some of the events is also off putting. Just because I can play on Tuesday doesn't mean I can also play on Sunday or want to play on that day and no value was added to the games. That decision meant I missed two £100 games.
Cheers
I like what this person is saying, I dont look at tournie that will go beyond midnignt.
Just a general comment. It is absolutely great that you open these threads to find out peoples opinions, however it's also likely to get a plethora of opposing opinions, making things difficult for you to decide which way to go. As unfortunately it's difficult to please all the people all the time.
How about a list of simply put questions, ideally with yes/no answers and/or a sliding number scale and use a voting mechanism. The advantage of this is that you would get a balanced opinion and more people would participate if it was a short set of simple questions.
For Example:
Should the Tuesday Turbo be replaced by a longer structured higher stakes tournament?
Should we have a high buy in/initially low guarantee Omaha and Omaha Hi/Low tournament in the schedule?
Should the Main/Mini promo be replaced my a monthly Tournament Leader Board promo?
That sort of thing. Then you can see real numbers, assuming you have a voting mechanism that allows people to only vote once.
Just a suggestion, thanks for involving us with these things.
Cheers,
Graham
Could Dan confirm as whether this has happened?
Queries were raised about existing schedules vs UKOPS. It appears like no one went through the schedules each day and looked at what tournaments people would play on a normal day vs what they would play during UKOPS. This meant some days (including Sundays) spend/number of tournaments played was less than normal. This means a number of us played more tournaments on other sites.
I question how well UKOPS was marketed when the High Roller/ UKOPS main appeared to attract less of the big names of
UK poker than normal. These tournaments are meant to be the flagship ones of a UK site yet I saw a well known UK reg on another forum ask when is the High Roller nearly a week after it had taken place.
As Tommy mentioned, there were mistakes made and massive overlay. Surely it makes more sense to have appropriate resource so mistakes aren't made and this can be funded by lower guarantees (and therefore lower or ideally no overlays).
From the outside it appeared like the key was generating new accounts and a eye catching overall guarantee. The service offered appeared to be very much secondary to all of this.
I do think there was many good things to come out of UKOPS, a good mix of tournaments, some great success stories from players and as always some good banter at the tables.
^^^^
Matt - thanks.
Might as well bite the bullet & say it's highly unlikely the Business will reply to that, but that's not to say feedback is not appreciated.
I can't debate it either, but I will say one thing, to give you some food for thought.
There's been much talk of how Sky Poker made a proper mess with that Overlay in those Super UKOPS things. It may be right, too. However, to judge their success or failure, you'd need to know the following parts of the equation;
1) The existing CPA
2) The CPA of those (genuine) new Accounts that signed up.
3) The annual & lifetime value of a new account, to both Sky Poker, & SB&G as a whole.
And I don't know any of those answers, & neither do you. And The Business sure won't be answering those questions, as it's commercially private, as I'm sure you understand.
As to resource levels, again, that's not something they can reasonably be expected to discuss openly - it's a Business matter.
Anyway, the feedback generally is welcomed, & with the next UKOPS already well into the planning stage, any suggestions will be looked at.
Keep the constructive feedback coming, it all adds grist to the mill.
^^^
They did used to have a dedicated Thread on 2+2, but it was very expensive & yielded very little by way of acquisition, so I guess it was not deemed cost-effective.
I'm so convinced that this would be an effective medium of advertising for Sky that I'd be prepared to do it myself for free. Of course, I wouldn't be allowed to do that but I think it should be revamped
More advertising, less mistakes, less variety (surprisingly), just get the basics right first.
Perhaps in hindsight (and this can be used in future) you could have run a 2500 runner freeroll a few weeks prior to UKOPS to test the waters with how the software could cope without impacting lotsss of players with a lot of £££ on the line across all games and without it impacting Sky's major online series when ideally lots of new players are logged in want you wanna give a good impression. It would need to be a freeroll run at peak time ofc, no point doing a test run at 10am then running the real one at 8pm when traffic is totally different.
The player base/liquidity just isn't here for regular big guarantee PLO comps imo. I imagine you keep an eye on the guarantees of all comps so if the existing PLO comps were smashing guarantees consistently you'd already have bumped them up. Out of interest, how did the UKOPS PLO and PLO8 events get on RE guarantees? I recall the first one missed it and I heard the one which was a main met the guarantee but didn't follow the rest.
Fwiw, I don't believe earlier start times of mains would be a positive, it would be a negative imo. Most other sites I know, if they have a 'main' it's usually around that 8pm mark. It's all good and well saying people don't wanna stay up too late, but people also have to be ready and online to play. Say your average Joe doesn't finish work til 5pm, maybe gets home 5:30pm/6pm, gotta have dinner, sort the kids, get settled etc. I think if anything main event numbers would only go down if it started much earlier.
I agree Tuesday's main should be dropped. The comp doesn't have to be dropped, I think there's room for an £11 turbo 7 days a week around the £750/£1k guarantee mark to start it off, around the same time it runs now. Then a new main can be introduced, maybe a £22 double chance (1 rebuy only to be used when u go down to 0 chips), maybe another BH, the latter is probably more popular.
My post feels all a bit scrambled, just tried to get out what I could remember before I forgot, but probably have forgot loads.