"TIME" as a deposit bonus code (before October 28th) gives you a free $5.50 "timed tournament" ticket, as long as your deposit is $30+.

Some of the timed tourneys are 180 minutes, some are as short as 30 (Turbo, obv.)


Got my "free" ticket and gonna watch a few that are nearly completed during the week, to see what kind of action to expect from the CLs and shorties in the final minutes. My guess it'll be similar to a Fifty50, where the mid-stacks will sit back and not risk getting a smaller payout, but the difference (vs. Fifty50) will be that the CLs will also be willing to call All-Ins a bit looser since if they win the tourney won't end (like a Fifty50 bubble bustout) thus there's less of a reason for them to keep the shorties alive while bullying the table's mid-stacks.

:crosses fingers: 6699 @ $150/300/30 level, I get AQs in the HJ and I open-shove with < 60 seconds remaining.


















... and ...























get a walk from all those now-very-obviously-nitted-up 3k..7k stacks at my table... so I go up to a final stack of 7389  

which is, ironically, 1.43% of the prize pool. What I had 8 minutes ago.  


Final payout $14.78 (see above ) ... and I notice now that a few CL managed to get really lucky cuz TOPS won $60, followed by $36 31 28 27 25 25 22 20 19 for the Top10.

So I am actually pretty happy with a $15 payout considering I was 24th of the remaining 84 players! The *3rd place* finisher got barely "twice" what my payout was!


And surprisingly/disgustingly, there were 11 finishers who got LESS THAN $5.50 in return... they literally "folded to the money" -- to a LOSS!

Tournament ID #457447693 if you want to glance through the info yourself.

thx, and well said fletch.

with 517500 total chips, if all FT players had the same stack that would be 57500 each, and they would be worth $115 each. For my 7k to get there I would need to double up 4 times.

So yeah, not a bad result for 30 minutes of freerolling



Essentially, this payout SUCKS vs. a "normal" mtt, but is comparable to a SnG in the sense where you can play it safe and not feel pressured to "build a stack" since you very much are NOT going for "first". If you build a monster stack, be happy, but don't feel like you've gotta use it to bully the other stacks -- because you really can not presume what the mindset is of all the middle stacks, let along the short stacks (unlike in a normal MTT, or a satellite, or on the bubble of a SnG).

Once you're maybe 10 minutes away from the end you can do some calculations of your stack vs. total chips and know approx. what your final payout will be if you just fold non-premiums. If you desire, and compare that to the top few chip leaders, and if there's a huge gap you might decide to gamble it up a bit, or (like in my situation) decide it's better to be happy with your current payout -- not really much to gain by doing a "doubleup or busto" gamble.

I realized afterwards that, because it's a 1:1 ratio of chips:payout, instead of you profiting from "folding up the payout ladder" you're not at all gonna consider ICM in your decisions. It's actually pretty much pure EV from what I can figure. So I think "ABC Poker" all the way, until the final 5 minutes where you might steal a few pots if your table is obviously super-nitted-up. From the beginning, like any MTT, there's plenty of bad players who will not let go of top pair bad kicker or will call PSBs OTF and OTT with their weak draws, from what I've seen, so you can chip up slowly that way, with a goal of staying at least average stack (for a double-your-buyin payout).

The final 5 minutes really depends on your table, like I said my table had no "bigger" stacks so I was 90% sure that my AQs shove would only be called by QQ+ and maybe AKs , so imo it was like adding almost 10% to my payout with virtually no risk. But at a "wild" table I woulda folded being that early a position, but woulda been playing a few more hands before that knowing how wide their ranges were. So in a way that final 5 minutes is like a typical MTT bubble pretty much.


I hope others who get a Timed Tournament ticket share their experiences and theories here as well!

That's a very good point -- after initial novelty wears off, the 8+ table megagrinders of non-turbo MTTs will probably never play these, especially since they might get them mixed up with the normal non-timed MTTs and suddenly POOF time is out and they didn't realize until too late. So in theory the Timed Tournament fields will be softer overall. Which means playing "ABC" until the last 10 minutes or so = optimal. re. other things you said, not sure about the structure of the other durations, but the 30 minute I played was (from memory, I believe) 50/100, 100/200, 150/300/30 (with antes on the last level only, I believe -- or maybe 100/200/20? can't remember). My guess is that the 60..180 minute versions would start at a lower blind level and progress a bit less steeply, thus at the final blind level it might be comparable, perhaps a bit bigger but not much bigger than 150/300/30. Might play a few more of them this week, before the October 28th deadline (since there will plenty of fishies with "free" $5.50 tickets, who have no clue how to play normal MTTs, let along these puppies).

But I wouldn't recommend "restealing" too often, even against a LAGtard -- sometimes those guys wake up with JJ+/AQ and have no problem calling a 20+bb reshove, and other times they will call with Ace-Rag or even 98s or similar, so unless you're re"stealing" with a pretty tight range, you're just gambling unnecessarily. Even if you have been super-tight, you can't count on the LAG noticing you have been folding 95% of your hands. Ideally you hope that the overly-aggressive opponent(s) at your table are smart/experienced enough to know that you all can benefit by just staying out of each others way and just take turns bullying (essentially what Matusow was hoping/expecting out of Carlos Mortensen in that Main Event final table many years -- they both had huge stacks, and Carlos re-shoved [preflop I think] with air and cost Mikey a ton of chips, then showed the bluff and they got into a heated discussion about ... stuff). Much safer than committing a stack preflop hoping the other guy folds (since if he calls with a 30:70 dog, you still get crippled/busted about one-third of the time, contrast that with safely chipping up against the chicken nits).

Yeah. Though it does seem like a slightly better game than Double or Nothing SNGs