Blog · 4 September 2026

Fix Attendance First, Then Worry About Your Points System

It is easy to have a strong opinion about scoring and no plan at all for attendance. That is backwards. A points system only ranks the people who turned up. If eight people turn up, no formula saves the night.

Turnout sets the ceiling on everything else

At 25 players you have a proper tournament: multiple tables, a final table worth reaching, faces the regulars cannot read. At nine you have a home game with paperwork. Prize pools scale with entries, and bounties need people to hunt.

Your points formula already pays for attendance

Under the default Chiprally model, main game points are a placement multiplier times the number of players in the game. The top nine multipliers are 10, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, and tenth down scores zero. Field size is inside every score.

Fourth in the busy room scores 180. Winning the quiet one scores 120. That is the most important consequence of field size scaling, and worth explaining out loud, because the first player to spot it assumes a bug.

Now run it over a 20 game season. Player A plays 18 and averages a mediocre 90 a night: 1,620. Player B plays 10 and averages a strong 140: 1,400. The better player loses by 220, and the only difference is eight nights on the sofa.

Attendance points and the participation trophy complaint

The usual fix for thin turnout is awarding points for showing up. It works, at a price worth calculating first. Size it against a normal result: if your typical field is 20, a win is worth 200 and ninth is worth 20. So a flat 25 points for attendance beats a ninth place finish, and a perfect record across 20 games banks 500 points, about two and a half wins.

Here is the test that settles the argument. Compare the attendance points available in a season to the gap between first and fifth in last season's table. If the attendance component is bigger, it is not a nudge, it is picking your champion. That is when the participation trophy complaint is fair.

Ten points a night is half a ninth place: symbolic, and symbolic is often enough, because the players who need the nudge are not doing arithmetic. They notice that the board acknowledges them. Either way, do not guess. Put a real season through the points simulator and see who the change would have crowned.

The quieter leak: everyone who scores zero

Only nine players score. In a 30 player field, 21 go home with nothing, some busted inside an hour. Do that to one player four weeks running and he stops coming, without telling you why. Better answers:

• Run a consolation game. The default second chance payout is 100, 50 and 25 for the top three, so busting early is a reason to stay.
• Use bounties. At 50 points each, a player who busts tenth having knocked out two people scores 100, beating sixth in a 20 player field, 4 x 20 = 80.
• Pay deeper in big fields. Nine of 12 is fine. Nine of 30 leaves most of the room outside the system, and multipliers are configurable.
• Keep the rewards that are not points. Aces cracked pays a free drink, which rescues a bad night for nothing.

Ask for a commitment, do not just publish a schedule

A schedule is passive: it says a game exists. An RSVP asks for a yes, and a yes said in front of the group is a different thing from an ignored calendar entry.

The practical value is the headcount. Nine yeses on Tuesday for a Thursday game gives you 48 hours to act: post in the feed, call the regulars who never answered, ask two people to bring somebody. Without RSVPs you find out at 7pm in the pub, when all you can do is apologize.

Chiprally takes RSVPs per game and tracks who actually attended. Log yeses against turnout for ten games and you know your conversion rate, which turns a headcount into a forecast.

Reminders, and when to send them

Treat a no show as a memory problem before you treat it as a verdict. Somebody forgot, or left it too late to arrange the evening. That is why game day reminders repay the effort here.

Two touches is usually right: one early in the week, far enough out that somebody can move a shift, and one on the day a few hours before, when the decision gets made. More than that and people mute you, which costs you the two that worked. Put a reason in the message, not just a date: who is chasing the leader, or how close the bounty race is.

Make the standings public and hard to avoid

Standings in a spreadsheet on your laptop do nothing for turnout. Standings a player can open on a phone on Tuesday keep the league in their head between games. Someone who sees they are 40 points off fourth has a reason to show up on Thursday. Live standings, an all time leaderboard and profiles with head to head records all give people a number that moves when they attend. See the features page.

Give the mid pack something to chase

By week eight, three players can win your season and everybody else knows they cannot. If the title is the only recognized outcome, you have told two thirds of the league that the rest of the year is exhibition poker. Recognize more:

• Bounty leader. A separate race decided by aggression rather than survival, often led by somebody nowhere near the top.
• Most games played. Purely attendance, and the honest place to reward it instead of smuggling it into the points.
• Most improved. Compare average points per game in the first half of the season against the second. It is the only trophy a beginner can win.

Chiprally ships trophies for season champion, bounty leader and main event winner. Announce the rest in the feed yourself, as they move. A trophy nobody hears about until the final night motivated nobody all season.

Breaking the death spiral

The failure mode is quick. Turnout dips, the night is less fun, the pool is smaller, two regulars skip the next one, and six weeks later you are canceling. Waiting for it to correct itself is not a plan.

1. Cut the calendar before you cut the league. Ten players twice a month is worse than 20 once. Merging two thin games into one full one is a promotion, not a retreat.
2. Set a floor and say it publicly. "We run with eight or more." A stated minimum makes RSVPs worth answering, because the answer decides whether there is a game.
3. Shorten the season. Twelve games people can plan around beat 30 nobody can commit to, and crowning a champion sooner resets interest.
4. Pay in chips to recruit. The default chip up table gives 1,000 extra starting chips for bringing a new player, and 1,000 for being one. Chip ups are stack, not points, so recruiting never distorts standings.
5. Fix the night, not the format. Blinds that run past midnight, a venue with no food, a start time that clashes. Ask two people who stopped coming, and believe them.

The short version

Attendance is the input, not a side effect of good scoring. Field size scaling already rewards showing up, so price any attendance bonus against a real season first. Ask for RSVPs. Send two reminders, not six. Publish the standings. Recognize more than the champion. And when turnout slips, act in week two, not week six.

Thinking about a scoring change? Run your numbers through the points simulator first, or read more organizer notes on the blog.