Epiphany Tournament at CCC Salzburg - a monster crapshot!

Before travelling to Nottingham and Dublin I wanted to kick off the poker year 2011 with something in my area. The Epiphany tournament at the Concord Card Casino, Salzburg looked very interesting: 12K startchips for €58 with one €25 rebuy for another 12k chips. As usually the CCC Salzburg didn't answer to questions regarding the structure but I expected at least something decent.

I was wrong ... as wrong as somebody could be. The least problem was that the tournament wasn't a rebuy- but a second-chance-tournament (so you could do the rebuy anytime regardless of your stack). But making this an 11-handed tournament from 128 players down to 20 players is a real shame. Could it get any worse? Of course it could! While the first levels of 30 min. with 50/100, 100/200(25), 200/400(50) weren't that bad (in regards of the startstack) it started to get really ugly from level 6-7. Not only did they go down to 20 min. after level 3 but going from level 6 at 500/1,000(100) to level 7 at 1,000/2,000(200) made this a real crapshot.

Imagine with half of the field left the average M was 10. With 40 left the average M went down to 5 and with 20 players it was as low as 3! Can't tell how it was at the final table as I busted in 18th position (with 15 getting paid) but you may imagine how it went there.

Of course with a total buy in of €83 I didn't expect a super deep-stack structure but getting a structure like this in a CCC card-room is really awful. The CCC's isn't known for the best structures in general but at least they usually had something playable (especially for their "events"). In my opinion the CCC Salzburg really ruins the good name of the Concord Card Casino group offering this kind of tournaments.

Looks like I won't be back anytime soon to this place!