Setting amount of guaranteed seats in a satellite

[Uniden32]

Would like to know how some of you come up with the number of guaranteed seats you offer in your satellites.

Recently, I was discussing with a co-worker about changes to our next series, and we got into a discussion of diminished returns on guaranteeing seats.

An example:

I run a $175 satellite where we guarantee (5) $1,500 seats.  We got 87 players, gave out 8.7 seats.

If I increase the guaranteed seats to (, I would expect at least the same 87 players plus a few more, but feel that more than likely making it (10) guaranteed seats would not affect the number that much.

Curious to know what others think.

[Luca P.]

I think it depends also on the buy-in.
I'm talking about my small cardroom located in a territory of about 600.000 inhabitants, all dislocated in a 100km radius.
We used to run satellites with a good buy-in/players ratio like 1/10 (1 ticket for 10 buyins).
Big buyins satellites (from 100 up) I prefer to run them as a freezeout or a single re-entry.
A little buy-in gives also the opportunity to increase the ratio because the loss is not important: a 20$+R+A with 20x200$tokens, you could make 150-180 buyins, still losing not so much (avg 600$+dealer fee)
what I learned from sats is that the quality of the spending of players is important.