MARCH MADNESS BITCOIN POKER SERIES
March 18th - April 4th
No 5k or 10k mixed events? Only 1 3k mixed event? Only 6 non nlh events? Only 1 PLO event? Are you even listening to your user base? One of the few things SWC still has going for it is that all the non-nlh games get spread and played there. For some reason there is the misconception by your tourney director that lower buyins brings in more player. Lower buyins bring more players who like to play tourneys with lower buyins. These are not the same players who play higher buyins. You have a large group of cash game players who play mix who aren't really interested in playing $20 or $55 mtts that pay out under $1k usd for 1st and would rather play $215s or $530s. You are not catering to them at all.
Obviously you will get more players in a micro stakes nlh tourney. The non nlh mtts are a niche thing. You have to keep them on the schedule and hope to build them over time. What you do not want to do is be results oriented right away. Play to your strengths which in this case is that you actually spread games like 27td, badeucey, badacey, badugi, stud, stud8, 5 card PLO, BigO. You can't expect them to crush it every time, but you want to keep them around. Patience, grasshopper. You aren't failing as a poker site if you run a non nlh tourney and it doesn't run, you are establishing a base for the long run and investing in the future.
What you do not want to do are the following things you have been doing:
1) DO NOT CHANGE THE START TIME EVER. The high roller 11 game was originally at something like 7 pm EST 2 or 3 months ago. Then it got shifted to 4 or 5 pm EST. And then a few weeks ago it got switched to 9:30 pm EST. You want to be consistent. Some timeslots are better for some players, some aren't. For example, the high roller is set to start at 9pm EST every weekend and Joe is a reg who plays almost every week. Joe can play at 9pm EST but can't play at 3pm EST. If you switch it from 9pm to 3pm you lose Joe, you don't necessarily gain another person who is available at that time slot right away. That takes time. It's not like you are aggressively advertising. And say you do find someone who would be a potential regular at the new time slot. They have to actually remember that it is at 3pm EST. Joe knew it was at 9pm and would make time for it. When you shift the time slot you lose players, when you lose players there is a chance the tourney doesn't run, when it doesn't run it discourages players from showing up in the future and they begin looking for other things at that time and then your tourney dies. CHANGE IS BAD.
2) DO NOT CHANGE THE BUYIN. This is a huge issue at a bitcoin poker site and sometimes you are forced to. I think you often overlook one of the key psychological aspects of poker. Human beings hate losing more than they love winning. This is often why you see people move up in stakes aggressively when losing: chasing loses. Now when you apply this to bitcoin and poker, you will see that people almost always want to win back the amount of bitcoin they have lost. This is completely independent of the price of bitcoin in USD. For example, James had 50,000 chips on SWC when BTC was $10,000, he has lost 20,000 chips over the last few months and now he has 30,000 chips with BTC is at $50,000. Chances are James is thinking that he is down 20,000 chips, losing, and wants to win those chips back, not that he is up $1000 in USD. People don't like to move down in stakes and that applies to stakes in BTC too. People will be much more apt to move up in stakes than down. You had a healthy 11 game tourney at 10k chips and it very rarely didn't run. By changing it to 5k you upset a lot of players and a lot of players lost interest in it because it was not what they were accustomed to playing for. Now combine this with the changing of time slots repeatedly and another drop in price to 3k chips and you have practically killed this once very healthy MTT. Now of course I would imagine that at some point you would have had to reduce this MTT from it's original 10k but you don't need to jump the gun on this because CHANGE IS BAD. All you can do is lose when you change anything regarding a scheduled MTTs timeslot or buyin.
3) YOU DO NOT NEED TO STAGGER YOUR MTT SCHEDULE WITH REGARDS TO BIG BUYIN MIXED GAMES. 9:30 pm EST on a Sunday has to be the nut worst time to run a regular scheduled mixed tourney. Everything in the MTT world on Sundays starts at around 11am EST, gets really going around 1pm or 2pm EST, and then drops off around 4 pm or 5 pm EST. This would coincide with when most of the NFL games are running. Also this would be as soon as possible after Sunday morning church service. 9pm is no man's land. People have already played their tourneys for the day. The sporting events are over and people are no longer sweating their bets. Some have even had too many beers at this point. If somehow you are thinking that staggering your big buyin MTTs is a good idea, you are doing it backwards. You should run the 11 game high roller before or right around the same time as the Big BTC, not after. A player who busts from the 11 game is much more likely to join the Big BTC in an effort to get unstuck than a player who busts the Big BTC is to join the 11 game tourney. A player who plays mixed knows how to play nlh. And on the off chance that the 11 game doesn't run, a player can jump into the Big BTC (This is also a great reason to have the 11 game be 5k chips like the Big BTC).
I suggest changing the weekly 11 game to 5k chips and moving it to 5pm EST or earlier.
Don't micromanage the timeslots and buyins. Pick something and run with it.