Multiple Flights Tournament Twist

Doing my day job I came across what seemed to me was an unusual policy a multi-day tournament has, so I want to throw it out there and see if anyone is familiar with it.  And also to see what you think about it. 

Grand Sierra Resort up in Reno is having a fall tournament series in the beginning of October.  They have two tournaments with multiple starting flights, the opening event and the main event.

The first one has five starting flights and the main event has six.  In each case, you can enter multiple flights—you can enter every flight, if you want.   Also, you can re-enter the same flight for the first few levels, and you don’t even have to bust out.  You can forfeit your current stack if things are going badly but you can’t seem to lose that last all-in.  So if you’ve got just a couple of big blinds left, you don’t have to actually shove every time as the end of the re-entry period approaches and hope you finally lose.    Nothing unusual so far.

If you enter multiple flights and survive day one in more than one flight, you of course can only play day two with the biggest stack.  But here’s what I found that was different.  If you do bag chips from more than one starting flight, they will actually give you back money—more than the original buy in—in exchange for the chips you won’t be using.

So in the case of the opening event, the buy in is $260.  If you bag chips from more than one flight, you turn in the smallest stacks and they will give you $750 cash (which comes out of the prize pool).  So if you play two flights and survive both of them to day two, you’ll get $750 even though you only paid $520 in entry fees.  It’s better than a freeroll, they are actually paying you $230 to play.  If you bought in three times and survived at least two flights, you’d only be paying $30 to play in the tournament.

The main event is bigger so it’s a $380 buy in with a buy back of $1,000.  So if you buy in twice they could end up paying you $240 to play in the tournament.

Both tournaments have guarantees, by the way.  It’s $100K for the first one and $200K for the second one.

The purpose of this is to encourage players to play all the flights.

Of course, the catch is, in order to get money back (before the tournament is over, that is) you have to survive at least two of the flights.  And there’s no guarantee of that. 

If you play a flight and survive to day two, you have a pretty decent incentive to play at least one more flight.  You have a shot at getting back more money that you paid in—without cashing in the tournament.  Plus, you might end up with more chips the second time, and improve your chances of cashing in the actual tournament.

What do you think of this idea?  Ever heard of it before?