Wednesday, April 30, 2008

UltimateBet's new tournament schedule

UltimateBet was my first site. I have been playing tournaments there for almost four years. I played there before the software change drove away a ton of business and have stayed there while the customer support and management have, at times, seemed to have been trying to get rid of the rest.

UltimateBet recently decided to let Poker Pro Annie Duke revise the tournament schedule for the site. One of the most attractive features of the site, and often cited as the attractive feature of the site, is the tournament structure. I will give credit to UB for not messing with the structure. What I can't understand is how the tournaments which had been attracting a steady increase in players on a nightly basis can just be moved. If you want to add new ones fine, but keep the ones that were drawing well. It appears that the lower buy-in bounty tournaments have been elminated, moved to a different time, or will be offered on a less than nightly basis. It makes no sense. When I first started at UB almost 4 years ago, there wer always between 400-700 players in a nightly $5 tournament without a guarantee that ran around 9:00 pm EST. During a previous tournament schedule change, this tourney was moved to an earlier time. After the software "update", these tournaments were lucky to get 200 entrants.
Before the most recent update, there as a $5.50 tournament which started around the same time as a $6.50 bounty tournament. There were always 300-400 more players in the bounty tournament.
I will have more on this later as I try to find tournaments at my level on a place I have long considered to be my home site and I have always continued to play there in spite of the pleading of many friends who play online. Now I'm beginning to think that they may have been right all along. Peace.

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