[ArunSh]

Originally posted on 02/12/2015:

While I agree with basically everything you say, I'm not necessarily sure the ultimate goal of the promo was to reward the most skilled player. Given the complaints (and lack of changes) of past finals, I think they sorta have an idea of what they are going for. I love the idea of rewarding the player with the most points at the end of the competition, but wouldn't that severely dilute the playing field in the finals days/weeks of the thing if there is already a clear winner? I'd like to think they are consciously making these types of decisions/rules instead of mindlessly throwing these things together, but who really knows.

The big problem I have with awarding it to the highest total points scorer is the possibility of cheating - imagine two people are very close near the end competing for 1st, and one person convinces other people to dump to him in a few tourneys (or puts a ghost in to dump to him for a few tourneys), etc. etc. When the award for 1st is a $10,000 seat in the Main Event, and second is peanuts by comparison, too likely something like that could happen (or someone could start cheating from the beginning in these ways even). Making it a grand finale where all players start on equal footing does at least mostly stop the motivation for trying to cheat like that. Not to say I think it's optimal, but I can certainly see how the other format might cause big problems itself in that regard.