Best way to handle pre-paid league

[mwendorf3]

Our league 20 players and is once a month.  At start of January, we all pay $300 up front and then divide that up for monthly payouts, points payout, and a 13th game for the rest of the money.  Since each tournament pays out $250, that works to $12.50 per tournament per person.

What I'm wondering is how best to handle players that don't show up?  The prize pool for each month is already paid.  If I remove them from the tournament, then the prize pool doesn't match up.  So should I just add them and then eliminate those that don't show up?  Just curious as to how others deal with that.

[Magic_fubu]

There's two ways that you could go about doing this, in my eyes. If you know the prize payouts that you want to give, just go ahead and insert them, lock them, and save it as a template so that you don't have to re-enter them every tournament. That way, the $250 gets divvied out, regardless of how many don't show. The other way to do it is as you listed - just bust them out right away. Technically, they have already bought-in with their fee, so they have a seat reserved for them. I would consider it a matter of personal preference, as both should accomplish what you are looking for. Personally, I would have all 20 be bought in, and those that don't show up be busted out w/o having a hitman designated.

[mwendorf3]

Yeah, I am doing the fixed payouts, so those are there..  Just didn't want the money to show off as it looked like it did.  What's also a pain is we do bounties, but those aren't pre-paid, so I think it'll be easiest to buy-in those who don't show (removing bounty paid), then do a quick buy in for the remaining players.  Even though not doing a hitman is possible, I'll want to remove the bounty to ensure everything stays accurate.  I guess it's not that big of deal, but was just seeking some ideas if another way.

[Corey Cooper]

You could remove the players from the tournament and add their buy-ins as a "House contribution".

The "correct" way to do this will depend on how you run your league, in my opinion.  If you have 20 players pre-paid, do you want your tournament to have only 18 players in it when run?  Might matter to how you rank your players overall, might matter to how you award points, might matter to how you create prizes.

On the other hand, do you want players listed in your tournament, and busted out, that didn't really show up?  If you compute stats and have a ranking formula, do you want a player who won a tournament to be ranked as if he beat out 19 other players, when he really beat out only 17 other players?