Why different prices for different divisions?

[joesouthfla]

Why is it that as you move up in divisions the cost of entries into tournaments also goes up? I ran several one day tournaments last year all one price and no one ever complained or asked that I charge more for higher divisions. Just curious as to how this came about. Should there be one price for Ams and one price for Pros?

 

[silverbullet]

pro players probably would not want to travel very far if entry was only 40$, as well as noobs not wanting to spend 80$+ or whatever price it may be

 

[18Down]

Take poker for example. Do you go straight to the $1000 buy-in when you are learning to play? No you start in your living room at $5 a game. At some point that level of play gets boring and you want higher stakes. Then you move up and get that same feeling again with higher stakes. I think it only makes sense.

 

[krupicka]

We have been running Ams $30 / Pros $50 for years (one day events). By having a single price for Ams, it removes that factor from the equation when players decide which division to enter.

 

[DavidSauls]

I've done it all ways, and I don't think there's a right answer.

It seems Pros aren't put off by larger entry fees. Most expect to win their entry back, and many expect to win more than their entry. So they don't expect to lose money, and the higher the fees, the more they'll win.

Common around here is one entry for Pros, a lower one for Ams. We've also tried scaling to a lower entry for lower Am divisions, with the notion that they may be more hesistant to play, and more willing if the entry is smaller.

We've also done the same entry for all divisions. I don't know how the players liked it, but it made registration and bookkeeping a bit easier.

Ultimately, I've sat in a lot of meetings for tournament planning, and we're never quite sure what the entry fees should be. It's always our best guess as to what will go over best with the most players.

 

[scarpfish]

I've usually found for the most part the simpler the event, the simpler the entry fee schedule.

Its also not uncommon around here to see Intermediate and Recreational the same price, the only difference being that the former has traditional payout and the latter has an extra players pack and is trophy only.

 

[ringerguy]

Thanks for asking this question. I have always wondered about this. Honestly, I am a little disappointed to learn that the price going up is just arbitrary. I wanted there to be some reason. PDGA regulations or something. I don't really care, but have been damn curious for years. It seems I will never have a satisfactory answer, though.

 

[Grungedude42]

We dropped our entry fees this year for our club's monthly tournaments. $15 for amateur members, $27 for open members. Add $2 for non-members.

 

[jenb]

The 2013 PDGA Tour Standards http://www.pdga.com/files/documents/2013_Tour_Standards.pdf recommend an upper limit on entry fees per division that seems to encourage lower prices for lower divisions.

In DFW, TDs were specifically asked by the local women to charge entry fees for amateur women's divisions that are the same price as MA3, so the am women will not have a financial motive to play down and create one person divisions. It may be coincidence, but it appears that may have led to some larger divisions for us and more women competing.

 

[JC17393]

Thanks for asking this question. I have always wondered about this. Honestly, I am a little disappointed to learn that the price going up is just arbitrary. I wanted there to be some reason. PDGA regulations or something. I don't really care, but have been damn curious for years. It seems I will never have a satisfactory answer, though.

I don't think it's necessarily arbitrary. The poker analogy is dead on. The price is scaled so that the best players are making the biggest "bet" in order to play for the biggest pot. It's as simple as that. It goes back to the fact that for most tournaments, the purse is derived from entries and only entries. So to ensure that the Pro payout was bigger than the Advanced payout, the Pros paid a higher entry. And to ensure the Advanced players had a bigger payout than Intermediate or Rec, they paid a higher entry. It was that way 20 years ago, not a whole lot has changed.

I think if you start with that premise as the reason for the various levels of fees, then factor in the "we want more, we want more" nature of players, it's clear why fees have gone up over the years: to accommodate bigger and bigger payouts.

Incidentally the PDGA does have recommended entry fees for each level in their Tour Standards document (Table 4). Unfortunately, I think some TDs (and players) misread this as recommended standards rather than recommended maximums.

 

[DavidSauls]

Thanks for asking this question. I have always wondered about this. Honestly, I am a little disappointed to learn that the price going up is just arbitrary. I wanted there to be some reason. PDGA regulations or something. I don't really care, but have been damn curious for years. It seems I will never have a satisfactory answer, though.

I'm not sure "arbitrary" is the right word. A lot of factors go into TDs' decisions on entry fees; among them are the TDs' best guess as to what will suit most players in their local area.

The PDGA tried mandating, or at least capping, entry fees once. The experiment didn't last long.

 

[biscoe]

TD freedom in these matters is one of the things the ORG gets right.

 

[CaptainAnhyzer]

Pro love to take other pros money......the more the better.

 

[Cgkdisc]

The reason the stepped increases originally developed had to do with reducing the reward for first place in lower divisions so the winner of the next lower division wouldn't win too much more than a player who cashed in the next higher division who shot the same total score. Although the theory breaks down when lower divisions have more players and more than 25% of a division get paid out, it was still an underlying reason the practice got started once disc golf started getting more divisions in the early 90s.

Once ratings based divisions came in, the tradition lost some of its appeal because when Ams play in or above their skill level each division was more like an independent events where it didn't matter (to some) if first place was the same in divisions of the same size.

For pros, stepping down the entry fees for Master and then GM came about because typically added cash was/is allocated to each division based on the size of the entry fee purse paid in. So the Masters and GMs would get less added cash to their purse if their entry fees were lower assuming the field sizes were the same. And again, first place payout in Master might be the same as 4th place in Open where maybe they shot about the same score.

 

[Organicvoodoo]

Pdga is overpriced and over-rated.