Learn all about Replay Poker tournament points

Confused about tournament points? You’re not alone. Many players aren’t sure how these points are used on Replay Poker, so this article details everything you need to know.

Tournament points are a scoring system that we use to create a league table or leaderboard.

Replay Poker tournament points have a similar function to points scored by teams in national sports leagues, such as the NBA or NFL, for winning matches.

Just like in a national league, at the end of the Replay leaderboard season (which might be a day, week, month or even longer), Replay tournament points reset and everyone starts over with zero for the next duration.

Examples

Let’s look at a typical Replay weekly league which uses tournament points to calculate player positions:

https://www.replaypoker.com/promotions/astral-league-ursa-minor-first-20

Don’t worry that the algorithm you see contains references to logs, square roots and looks like a complex equation. Tournament points calculation relies mainly on two metrics of the tournaments involved:

• Number of players
• Entry Stake

Now, let’s check out the typical score system for some SnG events, including the Astral Ursa Minor SnGs:

https://help.replaypoker.com/hc/en-us/articles/360008290393-SnG-Tournament-Point-Payouts

Medium Tier

Stake	Game Type	1st	2nd	3rd	4th	5th	6th	7th	8th	9th
7,500	Astral Ursa Minor	11,942	8,444	6,895	5,971	5,341	4,876
7,500	Astral Ursa Minor	14,626	10,342	8,444	7,313	6,541	5,971	5,528	5,171	4,876
10,000	6-Max	12,248	8,661	7,072	6,124	5,748	5,000
10,000	9-Max	15,000	10,607	8,661	7,500	6,709	6,124	5,670	5,304	5,000
15,000	6-Max	12,679	8,966	7,321	6,340	5,671	5,177
15,000	9-Max	15,529	10,981	8,966	7,765	6,945	6,340	5,870	5,491	5,177
20,000	Astral Ursa Major	12,985	9,182	7,497	6,493	5,807	5,302
20,000	Astral Ursa Major	15,904	11,246	9,182	7,952	7,113	6,493	6,011	5,623	5,302
25,000	6-Max	13,223	9,350	7,634	6,612	5,914	5,398
25,000	9-Max	16,194	11,451	9,350	8,097	7,243	6,612	6,121	5,726	5,398
50,000	Astral Andromeda	13,960	9,871	8,060	6,980	6,243	5,699
50,000	Astral Andromeda	17,097	12,090	9,871	8,549	7,646	6,980	6,463	6,045	5,699

As you can see, first place in a 50,000 entry event does not earn twice as many points as first place in the 25,000 chip entry event. This is because they’re not really twice as hard to win first prize in, though there might be slightly better players. But the higher stake is recognized in the calculation.

Also note that in turn, 9-player games don’t award twice the points than 6-player events. In fact, finishing last in both score exactly the same number of points.

One way to look at it is that first place gets a number of points based on the difficulty of the event, the stake level, and the number of players. Then each of the other positions gets a percentage of the amount awarded to the first place player.

Have another look at the table and you’ll see that 4th place is always one half of first. This has to do with the square root of 4 being 2.

Ninth place is always one third of first (the square root of 9 is 3!) – 16th will score one quarter of first place and so on.

Cumulative scoring leaderboards

Some Replay leaderboards are cumulative, such as the Regional MTT Leagues: https://www.replaypoker.com/promotions/regional-mtt-leagues

This means that all points scored are added to a player’s score every time they play a game, and the players are positioned according to their tournament point totals. Obviously it is an advantage for a player to compete in as many events as possible in these types of leaderboards because you always score some more points, even if you finish in a relatively bad position.

Because Replay wants to make other leaderboards open to players who might not be able, or even willing to play in lots of games, Replay has also introduced a ‘Best’ and ‘First’ leaderboard scoring system.

First number of games

Remember the Astral Ursa Minor SnGs? The Ursa Minor (First 20) Leaderboard is calculated from the first 20 games you play during that leaderboard’s duration, which is one week. It’s totally fine to play more than 20 games in the week, but once you have 20 scores, your ‘First 20’ score doesn’t change.

Best number of games

When a leaderboard is ‘Best’ number of scores, this means that only your highest scores are used to calculate your score. Once you have reached the number of scores used, your score can actually increase if you play more games and finish in a higher position than you did in one of your previous games.

For instance, if you play in 20 Ursa Major SnGs and finish in 9th position in one of them, your score will increase if you finish 7th in the next one because 6,121 will replace 5,398.

Note: In this case, your score will increase by 723 because that’s the difference between the old score dropping out of the Best 20 and the new one coming in.

SnG vs Multi Table Tournament (MTT) Leaderboards

MTTs can have leaderboards just like SnG, but there is no way to know in advance exactly how many points will be earned because the number of players is not predetermined.

Strategy

If you are keeping your eye on the leaderboard, then you might want to try to maximize your chances.

Playing as many games as possible in a Cumulative or Best Leaderboard will ensure you earn more points for simply participating.

Playing as skillfully as possible for the First number of games will help you score as high as possible in a First Leaderboard.

Skilled players will see when they’re about to reach the end of the number of games that will count towards the First Leaderboard. They might decide to change their strategy according to how many points they think they need to climb above players immediately above them, or consolidate their position to prevent players overtaking them.