[Texas72]

I tried one of these yesterday, and oh. my. God.

I started playing at 11am. Had a live tourney/party to be at at 6:30. 6 pm I tell my friend that I'm going to be late, just blind me out of her tourney. 7 pm I finally turn the tourney over to Scott, because I've got to go. At that point there was 50 or so players left, out of 1000+.

I just couldn't take it anymore. I hated to not finish it out myself, but not only did I feel it was more important to get over to my friend's, but the payout structure in these just sucks. At least in the $10 version - the $30 version appears to use a different one. In the $10 version the top 20% of the field pay, which ends up with the result that you have to make the final table if you want to hit any real money. Don't get me wrong, cashing is always nice, but after 7+ hours of work you want to see some real dough. I could have made more by playing the $1/$2 tables for an hour.

At any rate, these are nice tourneys and pretty forgiving in the early levels. I was on the phone when the tourney started and as a result made a couple of bad plays. But, it didn't hurt me so much given the blind to stack ratio. And when you get to the higher blind limits, everyone has these huge stacks in front of them, so one double-up can get you right back into things. Saw some pretty wild stack size swings.

So overall - a fun tourney, but be prepared to literally spend ALL DAY playing them, and be sure to check out the payout structure before hand. In the case of this one, I could have done any other $10 tourney and cashed more.