Tournament Entrance Fees

[iamfishman]

I think what Nataz and Diakanov have said sums up alot of my personal thoughts on entry fees.  It is a function of many things: distance, prizes, fun factor, quality with which and event is run, what else is going on in my life that day, etc.

I like to look at the entry fee not in a vacuum, but relative to the other costs associated with the trip. 

If I am going to have to drive 2 hours(about $12 in gas each way) for an event, usually this also eating out during the day($15-$30) for two-three meals.  Add in the occasional single needed for the event of a toll along the way and I am spending about $50 on the trip not counting entry fee.  This means the difference between a $10 event and a $30 event(while a tripling in price just looking at the cost of entry) is really a difference between a $60 and $80 day of entertainment (a 3 to 4 ratio...much less than even a doubling of price).  Given that the upgrade to the prizes is greater than an increase consistent with a 3 to 4 ratio when we go from a $10 entry fee to a $30 entry fee, (a library tournament to a mox tournament is a doubling of prize support) it is actually BETTER from a purely expected value standpoint to have the $30 event.

For local events it doesn't matter because you don't have that constant traveling cost that is independent of the entry/prize setup.  If the tournament is close...say a 35 minute drive like it is for me to The Grid in Manchester, CT...it doesn't matter what the tournament costs, I will be there assuming that the prize is appropriate for the entry fee* number of players.

I believe the above to be the mentality of the "road warriors".  I.e.-Yang, Trogdon, Joe Davis, Jeremiah Rudolph, Jeff Carpenter, Eld, etc.

Casual players have a different mentality.

They typically won't travel far for any tourney.  Local events will get their attention if they are cheaper...since on average they are playing more for the game, and not to make money.  Thus, they only want smaller entry fees.

What we have here, then, is participation of casual players varying inversely with both entry fee and distance and participation of serious players varying directly with cost and inversely with distance(since traveling cost is a function of distance).  There in lies the conflict.  An event must be cheap or the locals won't come and the event must have a high entry and offer insane prizes or few people from a distance will come.

Even though I said earlier that fun factor, quality with which an event is run, what else is going on in my life that day, etc factor into a person's decision to attend or not, I would think this is seen in both blocks of players.

So what is one to do...the answer is simple: BOTH.

On one end of the spectrum you have Matt Denny runnning $10 entry fee events at Hadley.  Normally, since this is about a $30 expense day for me before entry fee, his events would normally be just above my threshold for how far I would travel for a $10 event.  Fortunately, he runs a great event and this has convinced me to keep going back.  His players, as one could expect based on what I mentioned above are mostly locals.  He doesn't get much of the typical Rhode Island up to New Hampshire crew that populate ELD and Myriad Events, but that makes sense based on his entry fee(and thus prize support) and his distance from the Boston area.  If his entry fee went up, he might gain their attendance at the cost of his local fanbase(who seem more like Legacy guys giving Vintage a shot).

On the other end of the spectrum you have the recent Myriad event for $50.  I am much more likely to go to this then a $10 Myriad event because of the high expense cost associated with the day.  The difference between $10 and $50 is not a good way to think of it, rather, in my case, it is a difference between $60 and $100 with more than 5 times better prizes(since a larger % goes into the prize pool as he covers his base costs) for the later entry fee.  Seems like good math to me.  Will Dan lose some locals at this event.  Yes.  But maybe(and this is speculation) he knows that his locals are a type 2 crowd.  Maybe they wouldn't come anyway.  Perhaps he accommodates them with $10 Type 2 FNMs.  Whatever the case may be, it is a business decision, one that he feels is right, and one that will either be fruitful or not. 

Is it good to have both types of events?  I can't think of a reason why having both types is a bad thing so I answer with a resounding "Yes", it is a good thing.

Should we be surprised that this thread and its poll have a wide variety of responses?  Of course not! My two caricatures of types of players given above are just the ends of a wide spectrum who want different things out of their event.  While I do think all of the feedback in this thread is well thought out, insightful, and gets at some good points, I can't help but feel frustrated by this feeling that there is an unspoken motivation to claim one type of event is "better". I would hope that what comes from this thread is not an air of what types of tournaments are best, but rather a feel for what proportion of players fall in what places along the spectrum from "casual local $10 event guy" to "I want a $30 TMD Open every weekend road warriors".  This, and only this, type of discourse is helpful to TO's in particular and the community in general.

[thecman]

I voted in the <$10 range.  I'd just prefer to play more often and I think that doing inexpensive FNM style tournaments would be the way to do that.  Then maybe add a larger Mox event once a month or so in the $20-25 range.

[Godder]

Store credit isn't all bad, especially if the store has plenty of staples e.g. Fetchlands, FoW, some P9 etc. If the store has a good selection and reasonable prices, it's like offering all of their cards as potential prizes. There are tournaments that have a top 8 prize draft and they don't usually get ridiculed. Store credit can be a better version of that (although obviously selection and reasonable prices/margins are the key).

On a different matter, I think there are two groups of players here as well. There are those who are very good, and can reasonable expect to top 8 more often than not, and therefore tend to think of Vintage tournaments in terms of EV. For these players, higher fees and top-heavy prize structures are preferable. For everyone else, smaller fees and/or deeper prize structures are preferable.

An ideal series of tournaments, then, could be weekly $10 for staples and packs, monthly $20-$25 for a Mox and anywhere between 1 and 6 $30-$50 Lotus+ events. In an area with lots of TOs, each could operate in a niche, where other areas might only have 1 or 2 TOs doing all of it between them.