A topic that is close to my heart at the moment
Firstly on the rare occasions that I get to play a live tournament I am greatly in favour of the re-entry option. Due to where I live any tournament I play I am going to be a travelling player and being able to re-enter on the occasions I bust early is must if I am going to make the effort to travel.
I am a believer that starting a tournament late is giving up EV as when the stacks are deeper compared to the blinds I think a better player has more of an edge. Therefore I think a re-entry a few levels in has a slightly lower EV but factor in the travel costs being split between what is effectively two different tournaments and it levels it out somewhat.
Initially from a business point of view I was a little sceptical of re-entry tournaments but once I understood them properly and what the true effects and demands for players are I was quick to implement them in every event we are involved in.
In the early days of re-entry tournaments I think there was a lot of misconceptions about how they would affect the play and who they really benefit. In my personal opinion I am 100% sure that it does not give anyone a specific advantage in an individual tournament. If anybody is playing a re-entry in the same way as a re-buy they are giving up EV to the rest of the field. In a traditional re-buy tournament there is definitely an advantage to playing loose and trying to gain chips. If you lose your chips you are still on the same table and have a chance to win your chips back and also the payout structures are different with a min cash usually being considerably more in a re-buy.
When you use the re-entry option you are effectively playing a second tournament and should not take the first bullet into account when calculating your roi on this tournament. A lot of people who played our deepstack this February and re-entered suddenly realised this when approaching the bubble and seeing that the min cash was only money back if they had re-entered. Our policy on payouts is that a min cash is around double the initial buy in.
Like Dave has mentioned above we also extensively canvassed our player base before making the decision to bring in re-entries and it was an almost unanimous "yes" from them. Caveat here being that most players who play the tournaments we are involved in are travelling players so they are more than likely to see the benefits of playing a "second tournament" for the same set of exes. At a recent GUKPT before re-entries were introduced 100% of the players I spoke to after busting would have re-entered if it was an option. 70% of players who busted Day 1A of our Deepstack in Dublin re-entered.
From an organisers point of view it does bump up the prize pools and encourage more players to travel but can be at some cost to them in certain situations. I would imagine in a venue like DTD where players might travel but not stay overnight it would have a negative impact on their cash games as players might normally jump into them after an early exit. This loss of revenue is also exaggerated by the fact that most tournaments run at break even or a loss unless the reg fee is over £50/€50 for a multi day event. Bigger loss-making tournament + smaller cash game revenue is not a good business model! For our Dublin events this not so much of a concern as players who re-enter are less likely to check out early and jump on a plane home so we have more of a chance of getting them into a cash game. Similar applies to GUKPT where a lot of the player base may stay overnight.
The poll results are interesting but I feel they have little meaning unless the voters are separated into specific categories or there is more than one poll taking into account the different tournaments/festivals on offer to players.
Non scientific point - people are generally quick to point out things they do not like and slow to comment on the good things. Since we have introduced re-entries no-one has come up to me asked me to change it back yet many have said how much they like it. Some, like Da Bookie, have said they themselves would not use the option often but like they way the prizepools are bigger because of it. (caveat: this does not include forum posters who have never played our events before).
I also think that in the long run players who are losing will go bust quicker than normal as they are effectively going to get in more tournaments than before. They are also more likely to take a re-entry as you would assume that bad players bust out earlier on average than good ones