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pikeman327 · Posted: Mon Aug 18, 2008 12:31 am Post subject: FTOPS IX Wrapup

Another fiscal quarter, another FTOPS. As usual I've made up a statistical spreadsheet breaking down the events for this FTOPS, as well as all FTOPS past:

http://www.pikeman327.com/pics/ftopsstats.jpg

FTOPS IX was an interesting series. It started off very well, with the first 9 events both meeting and exceeding their guarantees. Then it started to go a bit south. The next four events did not make their guarantees, and Event #13 had to be voided and postponed for a few days. The trend seemed to continue for a while, with Event #16 yielding a dismal field of only 856 players (well shy of the 1,000 needed to meet the guarantee). After that things stopped and started somewhat; Event #20 fell short of it's mark, though Event #22 (the $2,500 buy-in Two Day event) continued it's rise in popularity with it's most attendance and biggest prize pool ever. Finally, the tone of the whole series in general was summarized with the Main Event, which attracted enough players for Full Tilt to still profit handsomely from the tournament fees (over $110,000 in the black), but it failed to make it's $2.5 million prize pool, falling just 120 players shy of attaining that goal. Like the whole series, it was only PRETTY GOOD... not great.

In the end, Full Tilt in general seemed a bit unprepared and out of sorts for this series. The Ali Nejad final table commentaries were hardly kept up at all for this series... only the Event #1 and #4 videos were posted by the time the Main Event began, compared to the first 14 events during FTOPS VIII. Also, the main FTOPS IX page wasn't updated as often or as quickly as it had been in the past. Combine this with the technical problems that caused Event #13 to be postponed, and it all seemed a bit patched together.

This sub-standard degree of attentiveness was reflected in the total tournament entry fee profit numbers for FTOPS IX.... only $804,034 over 25 events. Compare that to FTOPS VII, which had only 20 events, and yet generated an over $959,000 entry fee profit for the company. This means that even though the over $17 million total prize pool and nearly 47,000 total participants were the most in FTOPS history, Full Tilt actually made significantly LESS in fee profit running this series than the past two FTOPS.

The most telling fact of all, however, was the amount of events that fell short during FTOPS IX. 8 different events failed to make their pre-tournament guarantees, and out of those 8, 4 actually COST Full Tilt money to run (the red numbers in parenthesis on the spreadsheet). This is very significant, considering that all the way back from FTOPS I to FTOPS VIII COMBINED, only 3 events had ever put Full Tilt in the red before. And now FTOPS IX had 4 of them in one series alone? This doesn't bode very well for FTOPS X if Full Tilt continues to run the series this way.

Anyway, enjoy the spreadsheet, and good luck at the tables!

mathman1115 · Posted: Mon Aug 18, 2008 12:19 pm Post subject:

interesting stats as always.

One thing though. You say that full tilt lost some money on some of their events. I think it depends on how you look at it. Remember, all of those events had satellites (and alot of them). The sum of the entry fees of a satellite for buyins to any FTOPS buyin are proportionally larger than the entry fees for the actual FTOPS event.

I understand your stats are just direct, but i'd be surprised if they lost any money on any of the events when looked at from this perspective.

pikeman327 · Posted: Mon Aug 18, 2008 8:43 pm Post subject:

Yeah, I didn't take satellites into account... but I think that in general the final buy-ins for a tournament are a good indicator of how many or few satellites were run for it (though not exact)... so Full Tilt might not have actually lost money OVERALL for a tournament like, say, Event #16, but the data still shows it made LESS money for the company than that same tournament did in previous FTOPS's.

Of course there's plenty of additional expenses for running an FTOPS that probably vary widely from Series to Series, and I'm not even going to attempt to calculate those. But in general, I think the final numbers in the spreadsheet are a fairly decent indicator of the overall degree of success of an FTOPS. Given that, I think we can say with certainty that FTOPS IX was only moderately successful... as opposed to FTOPS VII for example, which the data indicated was extremely successful.

clussman · Posted: Tue Aug 19, 2008 2:07 pm Post subject:

Pike, good chart and interesting information but it took a while to load, even on my fast connection. I would suggest publishing the data as HTML or, if you prefer to save it as an image, use the PNG8 format which usually results in a smaller file than GIF when using the same color table. Either GIF or PNG would be much better suited than JPG though. In addition to a much smaller file size, the text will be crisp.

Again, nice info and thanks for posting it.

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