The Shark Tank

Full Contact Poker Apparel Bonus

They made good on the bonus the other day and I wound up with $271 in exchange for wearing a hat.  I also got to drop “I have to go meet with Lori Negreanu” into casual conversation about 20 times, so it worked out as an extremely +EV move for me.  It appears that there were slightly fewer qualified entrants than they predicted and also that the money that was intended for anyone who made a final table got rolled into the main pool.  I was pleasantly suprised by the amount.

Excess Chips at the Main Event

I first became aware of this problem through Richard Brodie’s blog (a fellow frequent flier, who I used to chat with on flyertalk from time to time).   It seems that in excess of $2.2 million in tourney chips appeared in the Main Event.  The initial theory floated by the Harrah’s people was that it must be due to chip races.  This is provably absurd to anyone with even a casual grasp of the math involved.  Not only is the average expected result orders of magnatude lower than $2.2 million, even the absolute one in a billion chance where every race at every table results in the maximum chip gain doesn’t come close to $2.2 million.  The only reasonable explanation I can come up with is cheating.  Someone could have smuggled chips out of the super-sats (which inexplicably used the same chips) or liberated them from somewhere Harrah’s kept them unsecured.  Because these chips have no value to Harrah’s (you can’t cash them at the cage), it seems possible that their security was lax.  It only costs the players.  The fact that the folks running the WSOP don’t seem to care about this speaks volumes about their attitude towards the players’ interests.

Dealer Tokes at the Main Event and Thoughts on Our New Champion

I am growing increasingly convinced that Jamie Gold is a tool.  I was willing to pass off some bad behavior at the table as gamesmanship, but this interview (MP3 format) has started to convince me that he is just a jerk.  The Hollywood gossip types are starting to report that his resume was inflated and that he wasn’t much of an agent.  The main sources are the uber-gossipy Defamer and Hollywood Interrupted, so you might take it with a grain of salt.  The bit where he gave half of his action away to Crispin Leyser has been confirmed on 2+2 by a friend, so I’m willing to believe that bit of it.  It has also been widely reported that he owes 10% of his action to Johnny Chan in exchange for coaching/mentoring.  That leaves Jamie with only 40% of himself.

Still, 40% is some $6 million, so I guess he won’t be needing a loan from final table players at your friendly online poker site anytime soon.  On top of all that, there were rumors that he tipped $1 million or even $2 million to the dealers.  No one has been able to confirm this and he has specificly denied the $1 million figure.  The dealers get their last check on Thursday and we’ll probably know the amount then, because the dealers are a gossipy bunch.  There is no way on earth he should have tipped that much, because Harrah’s takes an outrageous bite out of entry fees for themselves already.  They may not give as much to the dealers as they used to, but that should not be for the players to fix.

Frankly, the business side of tourneys is disgusting.  The casino takes as much as 9% out of the prize pool and rakes in tons of money from advertisers and gets paid to televise the thing by ESPN.  The vig charged to the players is higher than ever before and the outside revenue from sponsors is higher than ever before.  Something is wrong with this picture.  The big name stars don’t care that much because almost without exception they don’t pay their own entry fees.  It is the rank and file regular Joes that are getting screwed.

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