Poker Writer
A poker tournament evaluator on rainbowspuppiessunshine.com creates a useful tool to rate how “good” a tournament structure is based on its pre-existing assumptions. The site provides a ready-made calculator where you can enter tournament information to get an S-points (structure points) score.
The stated goal of the calculator, as stated by the site creator, is “I want to play in better structured poker tournaments.”
The S-points calculator has different checkpoints in the structure: Level 6, Level 10, Level 14 and Level 18, where to enter the ‘orbit cost’. The orbit cost is calculated by the total cost of the small blind, big blind and big big blind.
The most involved part of the calculator is the ‘100% minutes’ facet. The calculator explains it as how long it takes for an orbit cost to exceed the starting stack of the tournament. So the larger the starting stack, the longer it would take, unless the structure is very rapid.
It is a way to determine how quickly the cost of play escalates in a tournament relative to the number of chips a player starts with.
Is There Such a Thing as a Good Structure?
The entire premise of the calculator presents the idea of a ‘good structure’ in tournament poker. In its view, and in the view of many tournament grinders, the slower the structure and more value a stack has, the higher the S-Points and therefore the better tournament. The slower the orbit cost increase, the better the tournament is according to this calculator.
The calculator is a useful tool for players who are looking for a slower structure and searching for more play in the tournaments they enter. Some players also care more about the minute details of structures than others, and this formula can be a good way to parse out the finer details, such as a skipped level or the exact amount of the blinds.
It’s really a matter of player preference. In the same way, if a player wants a faster tournament, they can prefer the tournaments with a lower S-Points score.
Even if a player does not share the same standards for what constitutes a good tournament structure, the calculation can still serve as a useful barometer.
Separately from the structure itself, the formula also allows players to calculate the ‘vig’. The amount of money from the buy-in that’s not going to the prize pool. That is useful for players who are aware of how much of their money goes to the rake.
