Eventually all tournament poker will be played this way, so it’s good to get adjusted to it early on.

I think an interesting aspect of it is that recreational players will probably adapt by defending their BB wider than before – if their previous logic was “well, I’ve already got X amount out there, I guess I better call”, then that logic is going to apply doubly when they have to pay the ante also. They’re going to falsely believe that they’re getting better pot odds in some way.

What’s funny is that even though they were using pot odds to justify calling in the prior situation, they still weren’t calling wide enough – it may be that the BB paying the ante actually encourages weaker players to start defending closer to an optimal frequency.